Amazon ended the second quarter with 1.46 million employees, including both corporate and warehouse workers, about 4,000 fewer employees overall than the company reported three months earlier.
It was a small decline compared with the 76,000-person sequential reduction posted by Amazon in the first quarter, but nowhere near its meteoric growth of the past.
Amazon peaked at 1.62 million employees in the first quarter of 2022.
Some of the company’s cutbacks in corporate and tech employees were reflected in the second-quarter numbers, said Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s chief financial officer, on a call with reporters.
In addition, he said, Amazon has been making more use of contractors in its fulfillment and distribution operations. Those workers aren’t included in Amazon’s publicly released numbers.
“Right now, we are still pausing on headcount, except in perhaps customer-critical positions,” Olsavsky said. “So it helps our financial results sequentially in the quarter. … We’re still mindful of our cost structure across the board, and will be until we get back to a level of profitability and return on investment that we’re used to.”
In its second-quarter results, Amazon reported $134.4 billion in first quarter revenue, up 11% year-over-year. Net income was $0.65 per share, or $6.7 billion.
Operating income was $7.7 billion, up from $3.3 billion in the year-ago quarter and above the high end of analyst estimates and the company’s guidance.
The company in January announced an 18,000-person layoff, the largest in its history. An additional 9,000 layoffs were announced in March, bringing the total to 27,000 employees, focused primarily on its corporate and technology workforce at its Seattle headquarters and other offices around the world.
Amazon has more than 65,000 corporate and tech employees in the Seattle area, part of a workforce of 350,000 corporate and tech employees worldwide.
