Amazon.com Inc is to wind down parts of its Indian operations, showing that even the crucial growth market with 1.4 billion consumers is not immune to chief executive officer Andy Jassy’s cost-reduction campaign.
The company said it is exiting meal deliveries as well as a service providing bulk doorstep deliveries of packaged consumer goods to small businesses. The exits would involve layoffs of several hundred out of a workforce of thousands, leaving Amazon relying on its core offerings such as online retail in the country, a person familiar with the matter said.
“We are discontinuing these programs in a phased manner to take care of current customers and partners,” the company said in an e-mail. “We remain committed to India and will continue to invest across those areas where we can bring value to our customers.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Jassy is reducing expenses and jobs around the world amid slowing growth in several areas of Amazon’s business. In India, the pullback underscores Amazon’s struggles in one of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce markets, where it is facing regulatory heat and competition from homegrown conglomerates Reliance Industries Ltd and Tata Group, as well as Walmart Inc’s Flipkart.
After plowing billions of US dollars into Indian business over the past decade, the company has failed to achieve the sort of dominance it enjoys in markets such as the US.
Several projects in beta testing are also likely to be shelved, the person said.
The company announced that its Amazon Academy learning platform, which offers online test prep resources for students competing to enter India’s medical and engineering schools, would close in the next few months.
Job losses in the country are likely to be in the low hundreds, the person said, or just a fraction of Amazon’s India e-commerce workforce of over 10,000.
Amazon employs more than 100,000 people full-time in the country for its worldwide operations.
The company has attracted the wrath of a labor for making what it calls “voluntary separation” offers, and giving employees only until Dec. 6 to decide.
Globally, Amazon plans to cut about 10,000 jobs, its largest ever headcount reduction, people familiar with the matter said.
It has projected the smallest revenue increase ever for its holiday quarter, and Jassy had put in place a hiring freeze on some corporate roles and shut down several experimental and smaller programs.
Comments will be moderated. Keep comments relevant to the article. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned. Final decision will be at the discretion of the Taipei Times.
Work From Home Government Jobs: 5 Idea
This blog post is part of a special series titled "Spatial Insights into the Gender Employment Gap", powered by the World Bank's Geospatial Operations Support
World Economic Forum’s Centre for Industrial Revolution (C4IR) was formally inaugurated by Telangana Industries Minister D. Sridhar Babu during the concludi