Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed that it will be cutting hundreds of jobs.
The job cuts at Amazon’s cloud computing division are believed to be mainly at its sales and marketing arm, as well as its team developing technology for physical stores.
“We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organisation we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact,” an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement. “We didn’t make these decisions lightly, and we’re committed to supporting the employees throughout their transition to new roles in and outside of Amazon.”
The latest layoffs come on the back of Amazon trimming staff at its Twitch, Buy with Prime, Audible, and Prime Video and MGM Studios units earlier this year.
Starting from the end of 2022 and continuing through last year, Amazon cut nearly 27,000 jobs across nearly every area of the company.
Here in Australia, Amazon’s customers include Atlassian, Qantas, NAB and government agencies including the Australian Bureau of Statistics, NSW Health Pathology and the Western Australian Department of Education. Major retailers rely on Amazon Web Services too. In 2022, for example, Kmart Australia re-platformed its e-commerce store to AWS.
Amazon’s Australian business raised more than $6 billion in sales in 2023, with its retail business and cloud computing divisions both growing more than 20 per cent year-on-year. Amazon Web Services and Amazon Commercial Services both generated more than $3 billion in revenue for the first time in 2023.
AWS’s Australian revenue increased 22 per cent to $3.33 billion in 2023 from $2.7 billion in 2022 and $1.1 billion in 2021.
AWS has outlined plans to spend $13.2 billion in Australia between 2023 and 2027 as it expands its cloud computing operations in Melbourne and Sydney and will reportedly create 11,000 jobs in construction, facility maintenance, engineering and telecommunications in the process.
