E-commerce giant Amazon has begun laying off employees in its advertising business as part of its efforts to cut down on costs. The company confirmed the same, informing that it has begun reducing its workforce and sacking employees from its advertising unit. The exact number of job cuts is unknown, but the current round of layoffs is part of the 9000 job cuts that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced in March 2023.
In a memo that was sent to the company’s employees, Paul Kotas (who is currently Amazon’s Senior VP of advertising, IMDb and Grand Challenge), announced that it began cutting jobs across the team members of Amazon Ads in the US and Canada, and continues to follow local policies in other regions – something that requires “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.” The memo was later shared by CNBC by a spokesperson for the company.
“As Andy shared a few weeks ago, throughout the 2023 planning process, we’ve been scrupulously prioritizing resources with an eye toward maximizing benefits to customers and the long-term health of our business. For Ads, this process has involved reallocating resources by shifting team members, slowing down or stopping certain programs, or concluding we didn’t have the right skills in place to address our priorities. 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,” Kotas wrote in the memo. The company started informing its employees about the job cuts on Tuesday morning via email, according to two affected employees.
Amazon will not let the impacted employees leave empty-handed. Kotas informed that employees whose jobs have been cut will receive full pay and benefits for the next 60 days. And employees who are working in New York and New Jersey will be getting the benefits for 90 days. Apart from this, Amazon will provide them with an additional severance package, as well as “outplacement support to help with finding their next role outside of Amazon.”
Layoffs at enterprises have been a recurring theme for the past few months. The previous year saw an economic downturn in the market, wherein adverse macroeconomic conditions forced companies to cost down on costs, focus on profitability, and trim their workforces after overhiring during the years of the pandemic. Apart from the current layoffs, Amazon announced that it would be letting go of 18,000 employees last year, and more recently, announced that it will be axing an additional 9000 employees. At that time, Jassy said that the new round of layoffs would affect employees in Amazon’s advertising, cloud computing, Twitch livestreaming, and human resources divisions.
