Amazon India has announced to lay off 1 percent of its workforce as part of the ongoing layoffs. According to sources the e-commerce giant layoffs are expected across marketplace and Devices teams which could affect around 1000 Amazon India employees.

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Amazon India spokesperson told CNBCTV 18 to refer to Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy’s blog post. “We won’t have any additional information at this moment,” said the spokesperson.

Amazon aims to shed more than 18,000 roles, said chief executive officer Andy Jassy on Wednesday, as the company is looking to cut costs. The technology giant's boss in a memo to the employees said, "This year’s review has been more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years.” The company employed 1.54 million people at the end of the third quarter.

He further added that the company will start circulating information regarding layoff to impacted employees starting January 18, 2023. Amazon started layoffs in November last year with letting go off nearly 10,000 employees.

"After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs. One of the consequences of these decisions is that some roles will no longer be required," Dave Limp, Senior Vice President of Devices & Services, wrote in a blog post on November 16.

Also read: Amazon claims that no forceful layoffs, all resignations were voluntary

In November, an employee working in Amazon told CNBC-TV18.com that people working in the devices vertical, particularly the Alexa AI in India, had been laid off. An entire team of some 15-20 people working in the Hyderabad location in the Alexa AI team was laid off.

Employees working in Amazon had also mentioned that the layoffs can continue in the e-commerce, human resource and tech section of the e-commerce segment.

"We speculated that Alexa devices will be impacted because it's low on profit and that happened, many also speculated that the recruitment teams will be impacted because why would a company need recruiters if they are going on a hiring freeze?, so yeah I am just making myself accept the reality everyday that I can be one amongst the 10,000 tomorrow," said an Amazon employee in the HR and recruitment department from Bangalore.

Meanwhile another employee told CNBC-TV18.com that as the e-commerce part of the company and the tech team in that segment is usually engaged during the month of December (due to Christmas and new year sales), it’s likely that layoffs from these segments will happen in January.

The year 2022 was brutal for the tech industry as the major players in the industry did layoffs and hiring freezes to cut costs amidst economic downturn. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Netflix and many other global players laid off employees. The number of total layoffs in 2022 according to data from Layoffs.fyi was over 2 Lakh.

Also read: From Meta to Amazon to Twitter — A round up of big tech layoffs in 2022

First Published:Jan 5, 2023 9:14 AM IST