'Will continue to evaluate what we are seeing in our business'

SAN FRANCISCO: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said that the e-commerce giant made “the very difficult decision” to eliminate about 27,000 corporate roles and like most leadership teams, it will continue to evaluate what “we’re seeing in our business and proceed adaptively”.

Addressing the analysts after declaring a robust March quarter result, Jassy said while the company has taken several actions to streamline costs, “we’ve been able to do so while still pursuing the key strategic long-term investments”.

“This past year has seen us do a fair bit of cost streamlining. In some cases, it led us to shuttering certain businesses like our physical bookstores, Forestar Stores, Amazon Fabric, Amazon Care and certain devices where we didn’t see a path to meaningful returns,” Jassy noted.

In other cases, the company looked at some programmes that weren’t producing the returns it hoped, “an example of free shipping for all online grocery orders over $35 and changed them”.

“It’s hard to predict that all of these will be successful but only one or two working would change our business over the long term. We have a lot of work in front of us,” said Amazon CEO.

For the first quarter of the year, Amazon’s worldwide net sales were $127.4 billion, up 9 per cent year-over-year. Amazon reported $4.8 billion in operating income and overall net income of $3.2 billion in the first quarter.

Amazon shares jumped more than 11 per cent after the results. The company also saw strong engagement in its advertising services with revenue up 23 per cent year-over-year, excluding the impact from changes in foreign exchange rates. In AWS, net sales were $21.4 billion in the first quarter, up 16 per cent year-over-year and representing an annualised sales run rate of more than $85 billion.