QCOSTARICA – Amazon will cut 9,000 more jobs, company CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday in a memo sent to staff, reported CNN Español.
The latest cuts come after the company announced earlier this year, in January, that it would cut some 18,000 positions, that included Costa Rica, as part of a major cost-cutting effort by the e-commerce giant.
Jassy said the new round of job cuts will take place in the coming weeks and will mainly affect people working in the Amazon Web Services, People Experience and Technology (PXT), advertising and Twitch divisions.
It is not yet known if and how many jobs will be affected in Costa Rica, where the company has 10 service centers and more than 17,000 workers throughout the country.
“This was a difficult decision, but we believe it is in the best interest of the company in the long run,” Jassy wrote in the memo.
“Some may wonder why we didn’t include these job reductions in the announcements from a couple of months ago,” added Jassy. “The short answer is that not all teams finished their analysis in late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without proper due diligence, we decided to share these decisions as we made them so people would have the information as soon as possible.”
The latest layoffs at Amazon come amid a series of job cuts in the technology industry in recent months, as the sector faces a pandemic-induced whiplash in demand for digital goods and services and macroeconomic uncertainty.
Amazon, like other Big Tech companies, also rapidly increased its workforce during the early days of the pandemic. Jassy wrote Monday that the hiring “made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy in general.”
“However, given the uncertain economy in which we live and the uncertainty that exists about the near future, we have chosen to be more efficient with our costs and personnel,” he added.
Last week, Facebook parent Meta said it would lay off another 10,000 workers, on top of the 11,000 job cuts it announced late last year.
Earlier this month, CNN Español reported Amazon decided to permanently close 8 of its 29 Amazon Go stores to cut costs.
