Amazon is to cut hundreds of staff across its subsidiaries Twitch, Prime Video and MGM Studios.
More than 500 Twitch employees – a third of the streamer’s workforce – will be laid off, stated a note from chief executive Dan Clancy. It is as yet unknown how many of the positions are at risk of redundancy in the UK.
Several hundred employees at Prime Video and film studio MGM will also lose their jobs this week, said Amazon, which laid off more than 27,000 staff members in 2023 despite huge profits.
Twitch was initially set up for gamers to watch and share video gameplay online. It was bought by Amazon in 2014 for $970m (£585m at the time).
In an email to employees, Clancy said he was taking the “painful” steps to “build a more sustainable business”.
Clancy, who took the helm of Twitch in April 2023 replacing co-founder Emmett Shear, added that the firm had “conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future”.
Amazon made $9.9bn profit in July to September, according to its most recent earnings report. That was up from $2.9bn in the same period in 2022.
In an email sent to staff at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, senior vice president of the department Mike Hopkins wrote: “We’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investments and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact.”
The email indicated that job losses affect staff in the US and around the world.
Amazon bought the 100-year-old MGM Studios for $8.45bn in 2021.
The reductions at Amazon are the latest in a series of job cuts in the tech sector since the first two years of the Covid pandemic.
According to US career consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the tech sector cut 168,032 jobs in 2023, a rise of 73% compared with 2022.
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