Amazon makes additional jobs cuts amid cost-cutting measures, tech sector gloom

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley joins the Live show to discuss Amazon’s additional job cuts, cost-cutting measures, and the outlook for Amazon.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: Amazon's latest announcement to lay off another 9,000 workers shines light on CEO Andy Jassy's time at the helm. Since his tenure began, the stock had its most rocky year since the Dot-Com crash. The company, they're implementing cost-cutting measures and deals with slowing revenue.

Let's get to Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley with a deeper look. Of course, Dan, there are some broader sector implications that have really rattled Amazon at the same time. And they deal within a few different industries there. But within Andy Jassy's time as CEO right now, it's certainly hasn't been an easy go of it by any stretch of the imagination.

DAN HOWLEY: No, not at all. And really, what we've seen, Brad, is the vast expansion that Amazon did during the COVID era and then following the lifting of lockdowns, kind of the degradation of what they built up. Basically, they went out and hired tons of people, that were trying to build out new fulfillment centers and warehouses. And now, they're basically left with too many of those. And we to-- or they need to cut back on them.

So right now, what they're trying to do is find space for-- or find uses for that space. And obviously now, they're laying off people by the thousands. We had the original announcement that they had layoffs. They had the 18,000 back in January. Now, they have the 9,000 that they've just announced yesterday.

And really, I think what this says, is that the company continues to have problems with, you know, the broader ecommerce landscape, as well as AWS, right? They're AWS kind of was their goose with the golden egg. And now, we're starting to see a bit of slowdown there as far as sales go.

So you know, that could go to discussions on interest rates. It could go to discussions on whether or not companies feel like they have the cash to spare or if this is the right time to continue to build out their infrastructure. But really, you know, the ecommerce aspect and the AWS aspect kind of colliding at one point with the overexpansion that they're dealing with.

And look, Andy Jassy kind of summed it up saying, "Given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertain-- uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount." That was in his email to workers yesterday. So you know, we don't know if we'll see anything further, but we have seen additional layoffs from other tech companies who we thought were only going to make one round of cuts originally.

JULIE HYMAN: Yes. This seems like a growing theme, doesn't it? Dan Howley, thanks so much. Appreciate it.