Needed to streamline our costs: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy again defends layoffs

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has again defended massive layoffs at the company, saying, "we just felt like we needed to streamline our costs".

Jassy justified the mass layoffs at the New York Times DealBook Summit, citing economic uncertainty.

Amazon's retail business grew faster during the early days of the pandemic and "it forced us to make decisions at that time to spend a lot more money and to go much faster in building infrastructure than we ever imagined we would," Jassy said during the event in the US, reports Fortune.

"We knew we might be overbuilding," the Amazon CEO added.

Although Amazon has not revealed the numbers, reports earlier said the company will lay off around 10,000 employees across its devices, retail, and human resources divisions.

Earlier this month, Jassy warned employees that there will be more layoffs at the company in early 2023 "as leaders continue to make adjustments".

The e-commerce giant publicly confirmed some layoffs and Jassy announced more layoffs are coming as Amazon's annual planning process extends into the new year.

"Those decisions will be shared with impacted employees and organisations early in 2023," he had said in a statement.

"We haven't concluded yet exactly how many other roles will be impacted (we know that there will be reductions in our Stores and PXT organisations), but each leader will communicate to their respective teams when we have the details nailed down," Sassy added.

Amazon will prioritise communicating directly with impacted employees before making broad public or internal announcements.

"This year's review is more difficult due to the fact that the economy remains in a challenging spot and we've hired rapidly the last several years," said Jassy.

The massive job cuts have hit several divisions, especially the Alexa virtual assistant business and the Luna cloud gaming unit.

"We communicated the difficult decision to eliminate a number of positions across our Devices and Books businesses, and also announced a voluntary reduction offer for some employees in our People, Experience, and Technology (PXT) organisation," Jassy further said.

--IANS

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