Amazon will cut back its world company workforce by about 14,000 folks from Tuesday, Oct 28, with extra cuts anticipated in 2026, and industry observers say Singapore may not be spared. The layoffs are smaller than the 30,000 job losses previous reports had indicated.
The transfer comes as a part of a major shakeup pushed partly by the corporate’s growing adoption of synthetic intelligence (AI), in addition to efforts to handle over-hiring through the pandemic and management prices forward of the essential vacation buying season.
Amazon at the moment employs about 1.55 million folks worldwide, together with roughly 350,000 company staff. In Singapore, the corporate has round 2,500 workers throughout its cloud, company, retail, know-how, and operations capabilities. Town-state additionally serves as Amazon’s Asia-Pacific headquarters.
An Amazon spokesperson for the area didn’t reply a question on whether or not the job cuts would have an effect on employees right here in Singapore, however referred The Straits Times to Amazon Senior Vice President of Human Sources Beth Galetti’s memo.
Galetti despatched letters to workers’ personal email addresses early Tuesday morning that learn: “You might be now not required to carry out work on Amazon’s behalf.”
The letter added that the corporate is giving most workers 90 days to discover a new function internally, together with severance pay, outplacement providers, and continued medical health insurance protection for these affected by the layoffs.
She defined that the layoffs are a part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to chop paperwork and reporting layers, and shift assets to its “greatest bets,” which she didn’t specify. Galetti added that the corporate would proceed to rent in key strategic areas whereas persevering with job cuts in 2026, as CEO Andy Jassy talked about earlier this 12 months.
Amazon’s newest spherical of layoffs represents its deepest job cuts since 27,000 jobs had been eradicated in late 2022 and early 2023. The transfer comes regardless of the agency being worthwhile—in 2024, Amazon reported revenues of US$638 billion (S$826 billion) and working income exceeding US$68 billion.
“The world is altering shortly. This era of AI is probably the most transformative know-how we’ve seen because the web, and it’s enabling corporations to innovate a lot quicker than ever earlier than,” defined Galetti on why the agency proceeded with the layoffs.
She added: “We have to be organised extra leanly, with fewer layers and extra possession, to maneuver as shortly as attainable for our clients and enterprise.”
Amazon joins a slew of tech giants making job cuts in Singapore, together with Microsoft, Meta, and TikTok, in addition to corporations throughout the banking, vitality, media, and manufacturing sectors. In response to official figures, more than 7,000 workers were laid off in Singapore in the first half of 2025.
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Featured Picture Credit score: Jaap Arriens through NurPhoto
