Key Takeaways
- Amazon.com Inc. is cutting hundreds of jobs at its Prime Video, MGM Studios, and Twitch units as it redirects spending and reduces costs.
- The senior vice president of Amazon’s Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios told employees the company was redirecting its investments.
- Twitch’s chief executive officer said in a memo that the live streaming video service was just too big for its current business.
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is slashing hundreds of jobs at its Prime Video and MGM Studios units as it re-evaluates its spending priorities to improve the “long-term success of our business.” It also announced staff reductions Wednesday at its Twitch live streaming video service in a cost-cutting move.
Mike Hopkins, who heads up Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, wrote in a memo to employees that over the past year, the company has been looking at ways to boost the content it offers customers. He explained following that analysis “we’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact.” He added that to do that, the layoffs were needed.
Hopkins argued that the “prioritization of initiatives that we know will move the needle, along with our continued investments in programming, marketing and product, positions our business for an even stronger future.”
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy also sent a memo to employees, indicating that the unit will let go just over 500 workers. He said that despite efforts to “build a more sustainable business,” it had become clear that Twitch “is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be.”
Clancy noted that Twitch was “sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.”
Amazon has been among the big tech firms cutting their workforces recently as ad spending declined. Since 2022, the company has let go about 27,000 employees.
Shares of Amazon were up 1.7% at around 1:45 p.m. ET Wednesday. The stock has gained about 70% over the past year.