Amazon India Likely To Fire Hundreds Of Indian Employees; 10,000+ Employees Will Be Fired

By Shreya Bose Last updated Nov 17, 2022

Amazon India is the latest enterprise to be hit by mass layoffs in view of an impending recession and needing to cut costs.

Earlier, other prominent outlets reported that it would be firing as many as 10,000 employees.

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Some sections more likely to be hit

Now it appears that in India, hundreds of employees across divisions will be impacted as it struggles with slowing sales figures.

The ecommerce giant’s India headcount stands at around 100K.

Reports say that the India division is set to fire people across engineering and other departments, same as the global trend.

Employees in shared services, back-office and retail operations are said to be more vulnerable to being fired.

Twitter fired over 90% of its employees in India.

Elon Musk culled more than 3,700 employees globally, representing around 50% of its staff.

Meta’s layoffs didn’t impact India significantly.

But it ended up firing more than 11,000 employees in the process, a clean cut of 13%.

In this case, Amazon’s India layoffs are expected to run into the hundreds compared to the former two.

While Twitter had only 230 employees and Meta around 400, Amazon employs as many as 100,000 Indians in white-collar jobs.

Just 6 months ago in May Amazon India said it has generated 1.1 Mn jobs in India.

This figure includes contractual and indirect jobs which contribute a lot to the figure.

Here’s a name today’s youth will recognise, Sea Limited, the parent of the banned game Free Fire and ecommerce platform Shopee.

The brand has laid off 10% of its employees, or around 7,000 people.

It left India earlier this year and its share price tanked by 81% over the past year.

It’s not just the global giants but several huge startups in India have been following the trend.

According to Inc42’s ‘Indian Startup Layoff Tracker’, 46 Indian startups have laid off more than 16,000 employees in India.

Edtech has been hit the worst as schools and coaching institutes reopen in the wake of the pandemic.

So far in 2022, 14 edtech startups have fired more than 7,000 employees, as startups are forced to find the right product-market fit again.