‘Hard to eliminate 27,000 roles’: Amazon CEO on lay offs, But Will Pay Off Well

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expressed his confidence that the recent cost-cutting efforts taken by the tech giant will ensure its growth after it had faced challenging periods in the past.

In a letter to the shareholders, Jassy said the company’s decision to lay off 27,000 employees was ‘hard’, however, it will prove beneficial in the longer run.

The top official added that the company took a ‘deep look’ across its businesses and attempted to figure out whether they have the potential to drive enough revenue, free cash flow, operating income and return on investment capital for each invention. He further added that this retrospection led to shutting down of its physical bookstores and 4 star stores as well as Amazon Fabric and Amazon Care.

“We also reprioritized where to spend our resources, which ultimately led to the hard decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate roles. There are a number of other changes that we’ve made over the last several months to streamline our overall costs, and like most leadership teams, we’ll continue to evaluate what we’re seeing in our business and proceed adaptively,” Jassy added in the letter.

The tech firm further added that it will keep on hiring staff and continue to ‘weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash’.

On Amazon’s latest initiatives, Jassy said it is making investments in areas such as artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. He also said the company has been applying machine learning on variety of applications.