Amazon cuts jobs in Seattle as search for HQ2 location continues

Amazon.com Inc is cutting hundreds of jobs in its consumer business in Seattle, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday, as the company shifts resources into fast-growing areas like its work on voice assistant Alexa.

The job cuts, rare for the world’s largest online retailer, are in the low hundreds, the person said on condition of anonymity. Amazon determined through planning for 2018 that certain mature areas of its business no longer required as much staff for the results it was seeking, the person said.

It was unclear which specific teams inside Amazon were affected. Amazon’s consumer organization includes its retail and marketplace businesses, as well as programs like food delivery service Amazon Restaurants.

Seattle-based Amazon has been on a hiring tear, creating some 130,000 jobs worldwide in 2017 and announcing plans to open a second headquarters in North America, anticipating up to 50,000 more jobs there. Its full-time and part-time headcount surged 66 percent in the fourth quarter to 566,000 from a year earlier. That figure includes employees at Whole Foods Market, which Amazon acquired in a $13.7 billion deal last year.

0:50 Trudeau vague on how much Canada would offer for Amazon HQ in Toronto

• Trudeau vague on how much Canada would offer for Amazon HQ in Toronto
• Trudeau to meet Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during U.S. tour
• Amazon promotes digital assistant Alexa in 2018 Super Bowl ad
• Amazon sends over 30 bizarre packages including sex toys to Moncton University
• Video shows hair dryer bought off Amazon shooting fire

Previous Video

Next Video

But many of the corporate jobs are going to areas of soaring profit, like cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services, or areas where Amazon sees potential, like voice-controlled computing.

Get weekly money news

Get expert insights, Q&A on markets, housing, inflation, and personal finance information delivered to you every Saturday.

Sign up for weekly money newsletter Sign Up

By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

“Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, in a statement earlier this month. “We don’t see positive surprises of this magnitude very often — expect us to double down.”

Amazon hopes Alexa will become a regular part of consumers’ lives and will spur shopping orders by voice.

The company currently has 3,900 jobs open in Seattle, and staff facing job cuts can apply for them. The company has contracts for 1 million square feet or more of new office space in the city to hire still more employees.

The Seattle Times earlier reported the job cuts.

— Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Cynthia Osterman