Amazon has instructed employees in several unproductive operations to look for positions elsewhere inside the company after a months-long review.
Internet giant Amazon appears to be the latest to lay off staff members in divisions that have not generated a profit this year, following Twitter and Meta, according to a story in the Daily Mail.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Amazon.com Inc. is reviewing its unproductive divisions, including the devices division that houses voice assistant Alexa, in order to reduce expenses. This news caused its shares to increase by 11%.
Following a months-long review, Amazon has instructed some employees in underperforming units to look for work elsewhere within the organisation. The company is also moving to redeploy employees from some teams to more lucrative divisions and closing teams in sectors like robotics and retail, according to the WSJ.
In a post, Zhang wrote, “My 1.5yrs tenure at Amazon Robotics AI came to an end in a surprising layoff (our entire robotics team was gone!) It was a great journey to work alongside the amazing leaders and engineers, and for my part to help build out large-scale distributed systems via AWS for our robotics CI / CD pipelines. Thank you all for making me a better software engineer in the process. For the new chapter, I am open to both local (CO) and US remote opportunities for software engineering positions. Referrals and direct messages are most welcome!"
Amazon is closely examining its Alexa business and is currently debating whether it should concentrate on attempting to add new features to the voice assistant, which is already present on a number of Amazon gadgets, according to the article.
According to the survey, many users only utilise the gadget for a small number of functions, making adding capabilities more expensive.
According to data cited by the WSJ, the company that houses Alexa has an operational deficit of more than $5 billion annually.
"We're of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs," Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said.
Glasser said the company was "optimistic about Alexa's future" as it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon.
As the e-commerce behemoth deals with an "unusual macro-economic environment," an Amazon executive told Reuters on November 3 that the company will halt hiring in its corporate workforce.
"We anticipate keeping this pause in place for the next few months, and will continue to monitor what we're seeing in the economy and the business to adjust as we think makes sense," Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon had said in a blog post.
As per Bloomberg report, Amazon became the world’s first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value as a combination of rising inflation, tightening monetary policies and disappointing earnings updates triggered a historic selloff in the stock this year. Shares in the e-commerce and cloud company fell 4.3 percent on Wednesday, pushing its market value to about $879 billion from a record close at $1.88 trillion on July 2021.
The world’s largest online retailer has spent this year adjusting to a sharp slowdown in e-commerce growth as shoppers resumed pre-pandemic habits. Its shares have fallen almost 50 percent amid slowing sales, soaring costs and a jump in interest rates. Since the start of the year, co-founder Jeff Bezos has seen his fortune dwindle by about $83 billion to $109 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Last month, Amazon projected the slowest revenue growth for a holiday quarter in the company’s history as shoppers reduce their spending in the face of economic uncertainty. That sent its market value below $1 trillion for the first time since the pandemic-fueled rally in tech stocks more than two years ago.
"Experimentation and running with too many things that don't generate a return is no longer a luxury Amazon can afford," GlobalData analyst Neil Saunders said.
Recently, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, around 13 percent of its total workforce. Twitter Inc.’s cutbacks are under particular scrutiny as new owner Elon Musk shakes up the social-networking business and pares roughly half its jobs. Even Apple Inc., which has outperformed most of its peers this year, is slowing spending. Last month, Microsoft Corp laid off under 1,000 employees across several divisions.
According to data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas cited by Bloomberg, the tech sector also shed 9,587 jobs in October, the highest monthly total since November 2020. The report further stated that the total job cuts announced by US-based employers for the past month, meanwhile, are also up, by a marked 13 percent - with 33,843 fired from various roles across dozens of companies.
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 "Amazon joins the trend of mass layoffs after Meta, Twitter; asks employees to find work elsewhere")
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