In 2023, layoffs in the tech industry have shown no signs of slowing down, and the CEOs of Amazon and Google have hinted at more layoffs as the businesses assess their operations. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a letter to shareholders explaining that the business had to make the difficult choice to cut 27,000 corporate positions after re-evaluating how best to use its resources.
The Amazon CEO said, “There are several other adjustments that we’ve taken over the past few months to simplify our total expenses. Like most management teams, we’ll continue to analyse what we’re observing in our company and move adaptively.”
According to Jassy, the corporation needed to evaluate the viability of each of its businesses and inventions to maximise revenue, operational income, free cash flow, and return on invested capital over the long term.
Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the business is “literally looking at every part of what we do” to fundamentally re-engineer its cost base.
CEO of Alphabet and Google remarked in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal: “We’re working on it from many different angles to get there. As we said at our most recent earnings conference, we examine every facet of our operations to re-engineer our cost base sustainably.”
“The establishment of long-term financial reserves is a primary objective. We’re happy with the results so far, but we know we still have a way to go,” he stated.
“We’ll be eliminating around 12,000 jobs due to this decision. A separate email has been issued to concerned American workers. Due to differences in legislation and procedure, this procedure will take longer in other countries, “Pichai said in a press release.
Amazon said in mid-February that it would cut another 9,000 jobs, bringing the total number of layoffs from January to 20,000.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Twitch, advertising, and human resources (HR) personnel were slated for layoff in March.