Amazon Prime is no longer cutting jobs, says Prime CEO

No more jobs will be cut at Amazon Prime for the time being, Prime CEO Jamil Ghani told ANP. Amazon cut hundreds of jobs last month and last year at streaming services Prime Video and Twitch, among others. "I have no plans to adjust the Prime team," Ghani said during his visit to the Netherlands for an internal conference.

The American technology company cut hundreds of jobs at Prime Video last month to cut costs. At Twitch, 35 percent of jobs disappeared, which amounted to approximately 500 employees. Keeping the streaming site running is expensive and Twitch is still not profitable nine years after the acquisition by Amazon. Ghani states that Amazon Prime is profitable. However, he cannot say how profitable the branch is. Last year, the group announced two major layoffs at Amazon: 18,000 jobs in January and another 9,000 in March.

According to Prime's CEO, job losses are not something the company takes lightly. “There has been generous support from all team members around the world and many people on the Prime team have returned to Amazon in other roles. The team has been very supportive, including myself,” he added.

Amazon employed more than 1.5 million workers in the final quarter of last year, according to its most recent quarterly results. That is 1 percent fewer employees than in the last three months of 2022. In the Netherlands, the group said it had around 1,250 employees in August, including at the Dutch head office in Amsterdam. Amazon claims that no jobs were lost at Prime in the Netherlands.

However, Amazon is not the only major company that recently cut many jobs to save costs. Tech giant Microsoft, for example, laid off 1,900 people within the company's video game division. Internet company eBay lost about 9 percent of its jobs, which amounted to about a thousand employees.