Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, announced in a note to staff on Monday that the company plans to lay off 9,000 corporate and tech staff by the end of April, in addition to the 18,000 workers it earlier sacked in 2022 and this January.

The latest layoffs will affect less than three per cent of Amazon’s corporate workforce. 

The development will affect employees in some of the company’s most lucrative divisions, including its cloud computing business and advertising operations. 

According to financial analysts and filings, those two business segments have much higher operating margins than Amazon’s core retail business.

The annual planning meeting, which the company’s executives concluded last week, was primarily concerned with streamlining expenses and headcount, according to Mr Jassy’s report.

“The overriding tenet of our annual planning this year was to be leaner while doing so in a way that enables us to still invest robustly in the key long-term customer experiences that we believe can meaningfully improve customers’ lives and Amazon as a whole,” he wrote.

Mr Jassy has been trying to cut costs at Amazon for more than a year. During the pandemic, the company quickly expanded its workforce and prioritised projects that lacked obvious paths to profitability. 

He halted construction on the largest portion of Amazon’s proposed second headquarters close to Washington. 

He also scaled back plans to expand the company’s warehouse operations.

The business stopped hiring in the fall of last year, and by November, it had fired about 10,000 workers. 

By early January, that number had risen to 18,000 people.