Amazon layoffs in India may be higher than other tech majors: Report

Amazon's layoffs, announced on Monday, could result in job losses of "deeper than hundreds" of employees in India. The tech giant operates several businesses in India, including e-commerce, web services and video streaming. According to a report by The Economic Times (ET), the job cuts in India may be higher than the layoffs by other giants like Facebook. 

 

Amazon is likely to let go of 10,000 employees globally in this round of layoffs. 

 

"The retrenchment is happening here (India) and discussions are underway on the numbers," a person aware of the matter told ET. 

 

"There is a sense it might be relatively higher as compared to peers like Meta-owned Facebook and others where India was not affected in a big way," they added. Amazon's workforce in India is estimated to be around 100,000.  

 

In India, the company has its main offices in Bengaluru. The report added that the employees work from co-working spaces in other major cities. Including direct and indirect jobs, Amazon employs over 1.1 million people in India. 

 

The layoffs may happen across several sectors, including engineering. The company is expected to start downsizing its workforce as soon as this week, the New York Times (NYT) reported earlier.  

 

This comes amid job cuts from several big tech firms globally. Meta last week announced cutting 11,000 jobs, and Twitter has slashed its team by half since the takeover by Elon Musk.

 

"While a hiring freeze has been operational at Amazon for a quarter now, the mandate to reallocate workforce among verticals and projects was a recent addition. Functions, projects and verticals that had generated sufficient slack to deal with the buoyancy are now in focus for the resizing," Kamal Kamath, cofounder at staffing firm Xpheno, told ET.