E-commerce giant Amazon is likely to lay off around 14,000 managerial employees by early 2025 as a cost-cutting measure, according to several media reports. This move is expected to save between $2.1bn and $3.6bn per year.
This will downsize the company's global management workforce by 13% and the number of managers will drop from 105,770 to 91,936. However, there is no official statement from the company yet.
The news of Amazon layoffs resurfaced after Complete Circle's CIO, Gurmeet Chadha, took to X and called out AI-driven job losses.
"Amazon is laying off 10000 more people after laying off 18k in November. They call their HR heads as People experience head, chief people officer and fancy names.. employees are called families. Sab drama!!," wrote Chadha.
"AI or any disruption which brings misery to your own people is useless. Call me old school but I value people more than anything else," he added further.
Hiring Boom Followed by Cost-Cutting
According to a Business Insider report last year, these layoffs align with CEO Andy Jassy’s plans to streamline decision-making processes and enhance efficiency. Jassy's strategic measures seek to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the first quarter of 2025. It also aims to reduce bureaucracy and speed up operations.
Amazon told the news organisation that it had hired a lot of managers in recent years and now is the right time to make this change.
A Morgan Stanley report released in October 2024 also projected that Amazon’s restructuring might cut nearly 13,834 managerial roles by early this year. The financial services company also estimated that the cost per manager at Amazon ranged between $200,000 and $350,000 a year.
Amazon has over 1.5mn total employees, with most of them working in the company's warehouses and logistics operations and not part of its corporate workforce.
