Amazon is the latest company to join the wave of layoffs, following Meta and Twitter

According to a story in the Daily Mail, internet giant Amazon layoffs appears to be the next to lay off staff members from divisions that haven’t made a profit this year after Twitter and Meta.

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.

Software engineer Jamie Zhang of Amazon Robotics AI posted on LinkedIn that he and his entire robotics team had been let off.

“My 1.5 years with Amazon Robotics AI came to an end in an unexpected layoff (our entire robotics team was gone! ),” said Zhang in a post. Working with the excellent leaders and engineers was a great experience, and I had a hand in developing large-scale distributed systems using AWS for our robotics CI/CD pipelines. I appreciate you guys for helping me become a better software engineer. I’m interested in software engineering positions both locally (in CO) and remotely (in the US) for the upcoming chapter. We accept referrals and direct messages!

According to the article, 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 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.

According to Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser, “We are of course taking into account the present macro-environment and examining options to optimise costs.”

According to Glasser, the corporation is “optimistic about Alexa’s future” because it is still a significant source of revenue and investment for Amazon.

According to a company executive who spoke to Reuters on November 3, Amazon will halt hiring for its corporate employees while it deals with an “unusual macro-economic situation.”

According to Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon, “We anticipate having this pause in place for the next few months, and will continue to evaluate what we’re seeing in the economy and the company to adjust as we think makes sense.”

According to a Bloomberg report, a combination of rising inflation, stricter monetary policies, and disappointing earnings reports caused a historic selloff in the stock this year, making Amazon the first publicly traded corporation in the world to lose a trillion dollars in market worth. The e-commerce and cloud company’s shares dropped 4.3 percent on Wednesday, lowering its market worth from a record close of $1.88 trillion in July 2021 to approximately $879 billion.

As consumers returned to their pre-pandemic purchasing patterns, the largest online retailer in the world has spent this year adjusting to a dramatic slowdown in e-commerce growth. Its shares have decreased by about 50% as a result of sluggish sales, rising costs, and an increase in interest rates. According to information gathered by Bloomberg, co-founder Jeff Bezos’ wealth has decreased by around $83 billion to $109 billion since the year began.

As consumers cut back on their purchasing in the face of economic uncertainty, Amazon predicted the slowest sales increase for a Christmas quarter in the company’s history last month. For the first time since the tech stock rally that was sparked by the epidemic more than two years ago, it caused its market value to go below $1 trillion.

“Amazon can no longer afford the luxury of experimentation and experimenting with too many products that don’t produce a return,” said GlobalData analyst Neil Saunders.

Meta just let go 11,000 workers, or around 13% of the whole staff. The job reductions at Twitter Inc. are receiving extra attention as its new owner, Elon Musk, shakes up the social networking industry and eliminates about half of its workforce. Even Apple Inc. is reducing spending despite outperforming the majority of its competitors this year. Microsoft Corp. cut fewer than 1,000 workers from numerous businesses last month.

The tech industry also lost 9,587 jobs in October, the largest monthly total since November 2020, according to information from consultancy firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas quoted by Bloomberg. According to the data, 33,843 people were fired from a variety of jobs at dozens of organisations in the last month, an increase of a clear 13 percent over the previous month’s total job cutbacks declared by US-based employers.