Amazon axes at least 500 employees including Singapore staff

American tech big Amazon is shedding a number of hundred of its staff throughout its streaming and studio operations, in line with an e mail despatched by Mike Hopkins, the Senior Vice President at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, on Wednesday (January 10).

The layoffs come because the e-commerce big appears to “enhance funding and give attention to content material and product initiatives that ship essentially the most influence” for the enterprise’s long-term success.

Amazon’s announcement of the layoffs got here the identical day because the live-streaming platform and the subsidiary of the e-commerce big, Twitch, disclosed that it will lay off about 35 per cent of its workforce, or about 500 staff, throughout varied areas, together with Singapore.

Whereas the live-streaming platform’s enterprise “stays sturdy”, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy shared in a weblog submit that the organisation has made this “troublesome resolution” because the headcount of Twitch stays “meaningfully bigger than it must be given the dimensions of its enterprise” regardless of “slicing prices” and “making varied selections to be extra environment friendly” over the previous yr.

Final yr we paid out over US$1 billion to streamers. So whereas the Twitch enterprise stays sturdy, for a while now the group has been sized based mostly upon the place we optimistically count on our enterprise to be in three or extra years, not the place we’re at in the present day.

As with many different firms within the tech area, we are actually sizing our organisation based mostly upon the present scale of our enterprise and conservative predictions of how we count on to develop sooner or later.

– Dan Clancy, Twitch CEO

Amazon acquired Twitch again in 2014 for practically US$1 billion because it appeared for a means to participate in video gaming’s progress as a web based spectator sport. Nevertheless, the live-streaming platform has failed to show worthwhile since its acquisition.

Final month, Clancy introduced that Twitch can be shutting down its South Korea operations in February resulting from excessive working prices and community charges. Twitch additionally beforehand laid off greater than 400 staff in March 2023, simply after its longtime CEO Emmett Shear departed the corporate after 16 years.

In the meantime, Amazon laid off greater than 27,000 staff in 2023, together with its Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios staff. The e-commerce big is way from alone, although — as a part of a wave of world tech layoffs, Meta and Microsoft every laid off 10,000 staff final yr, whereas Google minimize its workforce by about 12,000 staff.

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