Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has recently remarked that the e-commerce giant made “the very difficult decision” to eliminate about 27,000 corporate roles and like most leadership teams, the tech giant will continue to evaluate its business moves, while ‘proceeding adaptively’.
Addressing the analysts after declaring the March 2023 quarter result, Andy Jassy said while the company has taken several actions to streamline costs, “we’ve been able to do so while still pursuing the key strategic long-term investments”.
“This past year has seen us do a fair bit of cost streamlining. In some cases, it led us to shuttering certain businesses like our physical bookstores, Forestar Stores, Amazon Fabric, Amazon Care and certain devices where we didn’t see a path to meaningful returns,” the Amazon CEO noted further.
Andy Jassy further said that, in other cases, Amazon looked at some programmes that weren’t producing the returns it hoped, “an example of free shipping for all online grocery orders over USD 35 and changed them”.
“It’s hard to predict that all of these will be successful but only one or two working would change our business over the long term. We have a lot of work in front of us,” Andy Jassy remarked.
Amazon beats expectations in first-quarter earnings of 2023
The e-commerce behemoth’s shares jumped over 11%, as income from its cloud computing and advertising units beat estimates for the first quarter of 2023.
The e-commerce behemoth, which is in the midst of aggressive cost-cutting measures, including laying off 27,000 workers, said revenue for the quarter was USD 127.4 billion, a 9% growth compared to the USD 116.4 billion it reported during the same period in 2022.
The Seattle-based company’s profits were reported at USD 3.17 billion, or 31 cents per share, higher than the USD 2.24 billion industry analysts had expected.
Despite coming in ahead of expectations, Amazon said that its AWS cloud unit, which pioneered the market over 15 years ago, grew by 16% during the first quarter of 2023, much slower than the 37% the company reported in 2022.
Amazon’s results are a strong improvement over a year earlier, followed by upbeat earnings by social media giant Meta, as well as Microsoft.