Ten thousand jobs lost at Amazon

Amazon plans to lay off about 10,000 employees in the near future. American newspapers reported that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Monday night based on insiders. According to the newspapers, the extent of the series of layoffs is still a subject of discussion.

The layoffs would mainly take place within Amazon’s devices division, which among other things develops the Kindle e-reader and the Alexa voice computer, and in which the company invests 5 billion dollars a year. Also among office staff – technicians and the human resources department – ​​there would be significant reductions. Fulfillment centers, where Amazon is short of employees by default, will not be affected.

Amazon employs approximately one and a half million people worldwide. This makes it the second largest private employer in the United States after the supermarket chain Walmart. It is unclear whether the series of layoffs will also affect jobs in the Netherlands. Amazon has established the international headquarters of its AWS cloud division in Amsterdam and last year opened its first Dutch fulfillment center in Rozenburg, near Hoofddorp.

Amazon is under CEO Andy Jassy, ​​who took over from Jeff Bezos last summer, to implement cost savings. Previously, Jassy had closed distribution centers that were not profitable enough and plans for new centers had been postponed. During the pandemic, Amazon invested heavily in logistics centers to cope with the increase in online orders. Amazon did this, among other things, by hiring a record 800,000 new employees.

Learn more about tech layoffs: “The cold wave of layoffs in Silicon Valley”

Other dismissals

With the layoff, Amazon (annual revenue in 2021: 400 billion euros) joins a series of big tech companies that are forced to cut staff under pressure from a struggling global economy.

For example, immediately after the takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk announced that he would lay off half of the 7,500 employees. Last week Meta followed, letting go 13% of the workforce (11,000 employees). Companies such as Netflix, Snap, Tesla and Stripe have recently laid off staff on a large scale. Many young tech companies (start-ups) are now downsizing due to a lack of new growth capital.

There are no major layoffs at Dutch tech companies at the moment, although meal delivery company Just Eat Takeaway announced earlier this year that it would not be hiring new staff at this time. Tech companies with large offices in the Netherlands that have already downsized during the pandemic, such as taxi app Uber and hotel website Booking.com, are busy hiring new staff.