(New York) Amazon will eliminate an additional 9,000 positions, in addition to the 18,000 job cuts already announced in January, its president and CEO, Andy Jassy, ​​said Monday in a letter to the group’s teams, published on his website.

This is a new episode of the ongoing slimming cure in the technology sector.

Most of these new job cuts concern the remote computing activity (cloud computing) Amazon Web Services (AWS), the PXT department dedicated to human resources management, the staff dedicated to advertising, as well as the platform Twitch video,” Jassy said.

The layoffs announced since the start of January represent about 1.7% of the workforce at Amazon, which had 1.54 million employees worldwide at the end of 2022.

Andy Jassy justified this second wave of job cuts by the fact that the analyzes carried out in certain departments had taken longer than for others, but it is part of the same savings process initiated in the fall.

The Seattle giant recorded a 98% drop in net profit in the fourth quarter of 2022, which came out well below what analysts had expected.

“For several years” prior to 2023, “most of our businesses increased their workforce significantly”, which “made sense [at the time] given the evolution of our business and the economy Mr. Jassy recalled on Monday.

Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2022, Amazon recruited, net, 700,000 people, and thus increased the number of its employees by 83%.

The end of confinements and the gradual return to the office slowed the trajectory of the group, which had experienced insolent growth with the COVID-19 pandemic and the acceleration of online commerce.

To this was added the cycle of monetary tightening by the American central bank (Fed), which began in the spring of 2022, which caused a sharp rise in interest rates, to which the technology sector is particularly sensitive due to the significant financing needs. .