The company told Wall Street that it had tightened its belt in the past and could do so again. Last week, Amazon executives met with institutional investors, according to three people familiar with the matter, at a time when its stock price had fallen to its lowest level since the early days of the pandemic and its market value since Andy Jassy took over as chief executive last year. $1 trillion evaporated.
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Does the source know the information? What are their motivations for telling us? Have they proven reliable in the past? Can we verify this information? Even when comfortable with the issues, The New York Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor knew the identity of the source.
gentlemen. Jassy, who previously ran Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing business, has been closely reviewing the business to cut costs quickly. He initially pulled back on a warehouse expansion that had been overstretched during the pandemic, before moving to other parts of the company.
Amazon has also shut down or scaled back some initiatives in recent months, including Amazon Care, whose services that provide primary and emergency health care have failed to find enough customers; and Scout, a smaller home delivery service, according to Bloomberg Robotics, with 400 employees; and Fabric.com, a subsidiary that has sold sewing supplies for 30 years.
It shed nearly 80,000 employees from April to September, largely by cutting hourly workers through high attrition rates.
Amazon froze hiring on several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open positions in its core retail business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including its cloud computing unit, for the next few months.
The news came so suddenly that recruiters didn’t receive the candidates’ talking points until nearly a week later, according to a copy of the talking points seen by The New York Times.
Devices and Alexa have long been seen internally as being at risk of layoffs. Alexa and related devices are quickly becoming a top priority for the company as Amazon races to create the leading voice assistant, which leaders believe can replace cell phones as the next big consumer interface. From 2017 to 2018, Amazon doubled its Alexa and Echo device workforce to 10,000 engineers. At some point, any engineer who gets a job offer elsewhere at Amazon should get an Alexa job offer.