Seattle-based E-commerce giant, Amazon Inc, published its earnings report for the second quarter a few days ago. Apart from the financial details regarding the business, the report also mentioned how many people were fired or resigned from the eCommerce company in the last quarter.
The total headcount of the workforce in Amazon Inc reduced from, 1622000 in March 2022 to 1523000 in June 2022. This means that nearly, 99000 people who were working in part-time or full-time positions in the company lost their jobs in the last 3 months.
This amount of decline in its workforce is the largest quarter-to-quarter drop the company has ever seen in its history.
Chief Financial Officer of Amazon Inc, Brian Olsavsky, said that the main reason for the colossal decline was the high attrition rate in the fulfillment and distribution centers operated by Amazon. Brian was speaking to news reporters soon after the company released its earnings reports for the quarter that ended in June 2022.
He added that Amazon would be very cautious in future when it plans to hire new employees and workers for the company’s headquarters and new offices which are coming up in various states in the USA.
When asked about similar actions by other tech companies, Brian said that it was important for huge companies to step back and rethink their hiring plans. Brian was of the opinion that Amazon would not be hiring new employees at the same pace it hired during the pandemic time to keep up with demands.
There were various reports earlier which pointed out the fact that the distribution centers and warehouses of Amazon Inc were overstaffed. During the pandemic times and successive lockdown restrictions, Amazon nearly doubled its headcount by hiring more than 800000 into its payroll. This action was done to keep up with the increasing demand for online shopping.
Even though Amazon Inc would continue to pursue hiring targets for engineers and specialized jobs in services such as AWS, recruitment of the workforce to warehouses and distribution systems would slow down heavily.
In May, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon Inc, Andy Jassy informed investors regarding the plans of the company to implement strict cost-cutting measures. These included cutting jobs and reducing extra expenses. The cost-cutting measures were deemed necessary to take the consumer business back to profitability.
Even though there was nearly a decline in headcount at Amazon on a quarter-to-quarter basis, the workforce at the eCommerce company has increased by nearly 14% when compared to the second quarter of last financial year.