Amazon on April 18 began further reducing its workforce by letting go of several employees in its advertising unit to trim costs, the e-commerce giant has confirmed.

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"This morning we took the difficult step of informing Amazon Ads team members who were impacted by role reductions in the U.S. and Canada. In other regions, we are following local policies which require additional time and process steps, including consultation with employee representative bodies. We will communicate with affected employees in other regions in accordance with those policies and timelines," Paul Kotas, Amazon’s senior vice president of advertising, IMDb and Grand Challenge said in a memo sent to employees, shared with CNBC by an Amazon spokesperson.

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Kotas noted that as CEO Andy Jassy shared a few weeks ago, throughout the 2023 planning process, the company has been scrupulously prioritising resources with an eye toward maximising benefits to customers and the long-term health of its business.

For Ads, the process has involved reallocating resources by shifting team members, slowing down or stopping certain programmes, or concluding the company didn’t have the right skills in place to address its priorities, he added.

“As a result, we have made deeply-considered decisions about how best to move forward, resulting in role eliminations for a small percentage of our organization,” he said.

Though the exact number of layoffs is yet to be known, this latest move is part of the 9,000 job cuts that CEO Jassy announced in March, over the 18,000 eliminations already announced last November and in January.

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The layoffs in the past months were primarily focused in retail, devices, recruiting and human resources divisions.

Like other tech companies, including Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon ramped up hiring during the pandemic to meet the demand from homebound Americans that were increasingly buying stuff online to keep themselves safe from the virus.

Amazon's workforce, in warehouses and offices, doubled to more than 1.6 million people in about two years. But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic eased. The company began pausing or cancelling its warehouse expansion plans last year.

Amid growing anxiety over the potential for a recession, Amazon in the past few months shut down a subsidiary that’s been selling fabrics for nearly 30 years and shuttered its hybrid virtual, in-home care service Amazon Care among other cost-cutting moves.

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Jassy said last month that given the uncertain economy and the “uncertainty that exists in the near future," the company has chosen to be more streamlined.

Given the “uncertainty,” Amazon is undergoing the largest layoffs in its 29-year history. With the last announced 9,000 impending layoffs, the total number of job cuts the company is looking at stands at 27,000.

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First Published:Apr 19, 2023 7:43 AM IST