Amazon to lay off 9,000 workers

E-commerce giant Amazon says it will lay off 9,000 more staff by the end of April, two months after sacking more than 18,000 workers.

– Key points to note

The latest layoff will affect 3% of the company’s workforce, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff on Monday, blaming economic uncertainties.

“However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our cost and headcount,” Mr Jassy said.

Amazon Web Services announced the opening of its first office in Nigeria in Lagos last November.  The company said at the time the new office was part of its support for the growing number of customers and partners in Nigeria. It came five years after its first Africa office was opened in Johannesburg in 2017.

It is not clear how the latest layoffs affect Nigerian workers both is its Lagos office and elsewhere.

– Learn more

Many tech companies have laid off workers in recent months, citing economic problems as they try to cut costs.

The pandemic year produced Amazon’s most profitable season on record as consumers flocked online to shop and companies signed up to its cloud computing services. But the company’s haste to expand its workforce and take up projects that lacked obvious paths to profitability, slowed its growth to the lowest rate in two decades.

In November 2022, Amazon planned to lay off approximately 10,000 people in its corporate and technology sectors, which was already seen as its biggest job cuts. The company increased the figure to 18,000 in January.

Mr Jassy said the company planned to reduce the number of staff this year but in a way that will help the company to achieve its goal.

“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” he said.