The company has told Wall Street that it has tightened its belt in the past and may do so again. Amazon executives met with institutional investors last week, according to three people, just as the stock fell to its lowest level since the early days of the pandemic, erasing $1 trillion in value since Andy Jassy took over as CEO last year.
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Mr. Jassy, who previously ran Amazon’s lucrative cloud computing business, has been watching companies closely to reduce costs quickly. He initially withdrew from a warehouse expansion that was under pressure during the pandemic, then moved to other parts of the company.
In recent months, Amazon has also closed or scaled back a number of initiatives, including Amazon Care, its primary and emergency care service that couldn’t find enough customers; Scout, the cooler-sized home delivery robot, which, according to Bloomberg, employed 400 people; and Fabric.com, a subsidiary that has been selling sewing supplies for three decades.
From April to September, the workforce was reduced by nearly 80,000 people, primarily due to strong hourly workforce turnover.
Amazon froze the hiring of several smaller teams in September. In October, it stopped filling more than 10,000 open positions in its core business. Two weeks ago, it froze corporate hiring across the company, including the cloud computing division, for the next several months.
That news came so suddenly that recruiters didn’t receive conversation topics for applicants until nearly a week later, according to a copy of the conversation topics The New York Times perused.
Devices and Alexa have long been seen internally as risks for budget cuts. Alexa and related devices skyrocketed to a top corporate priority as Amazon raced to create the industry-leading voice assistant, which leaders believed could supersede mobile phones as the next essential consumer interface. From 2017 to 2018, Amazon doubled its workforce on Alexa and Echo devices to 10,000 technicians. At one point, every engineer who got a job offer for other Amazon roles also had to get an offer from Alexa.
