Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, penned an annual letter to shareholders delineating the company’s past difficulties and expressing confidence that recent cost-cutting efforts will aid the tech giant’s development. In the letter, which was posted on the website of the e-commerce behemoth, he also stated that the decision to lay off 27,000 employees was “difficult,” but will ultimately benefit the company.
Andy Jassy said firing 27,000 employees was “hard” but will help the firm.
“Over the past several months, we took a comprehensive look at the entire company, business by business and invention by the invention, and asked ourselves if we had conviction about each initiative’s long-term potential to generate sufficient revenue, operating income, free cash flow, and return on invested capital,”
he wrote. Mr. Jassy emphasized that this resulted in the closure of physical store concepts such as Bookstores and 4 Star stores, the end of Amazon Fabric and Amazon Care, and the abandonment of “some newer devices for which we did not see a path to meaningful returns.”
“We reordered our spending priorities, which ultimately led to the difficult decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate positions. We’ve made a number of other adjustments over the past few months to reduce our overall costs, and, like most management teams, we’ll continue to assess our business environment and adapt accordingly,” he added.
Amazon will continue hiring and “compensation to stock options rather than cash.”
In addition, he emphasized that Amazon will continue to hire employees and assured that the company will continue to provide “compensation in the form of stock options rather than cash.”
Moreover, he stated in the letter that Amazon is investing in new areas, such as artificial intelligence, in response to the rise of artificial intelligence tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have attracted Silicon Valley’s attention and ignited a technological arms race between Microsoft and Google.
Mr. Jassy asserted that the company has utilized machine learning in a diversity of applications over the past few decades. It is currently developing language models or artificial intelligence (AI) programs that could improve “virtually every customer experience.”
Network Hype Team