Andy Jassy, CEO of Club holding Amazon (AMZN), said Thursday he’s committed to investing in overall growth while creating cost efficiencies throughout the enterprise. But the e-commerce and cloud giant has not embarked on the kind of substantial cost-cutting measures needed to fundamentally improve profitability in the same way as some of its Big Tech brethren. In a wide-ranging CNBC interview Thursday morning, Jassy outlined Amazon’s focus to streamline and reprioritize costs and expenses across its business units. The CEO, who emphasized many of the same themes in his annual letter to shareholders released hours earlier, also said he’s optimistic about future growth in its key areas like grocery, advertising and cloud computing. “While it’s tempting in turbulent times only to focus on your existing large businesses, to build a sustainable, long-lasting, growing company that helps customers across a large number of dimensions, you can’t stop inventing and working on long-term customer experiences that can meaningfully impact customers and your company,” Jassy said in his annual shareholder letter to investors. However, as broader economic pressures mount, Jassy told CNBC he’s seeing “a lot of trade down” among consumers who are trying to save money. “Consumers are spending but they’re just much more careful about what they’re spending on.” Given those dynamics, Jim Cramer has been calling for Amazon to really right-size its operations and further reduce its bloated workforce, which ballooned to over 1.62 million in Q1 of 2021 to meet record online shopping demand in the early days of the Covid pandemic. “This is a company that’s not efficient,” Jim said Thursday, following Jassy’s CNBC interview and shareholder letter. “I don’t like to hear in an era of efficiency that you’re spending a fortune on things that don’t work. Amazon is not where I want it to be.” Jim’s reference to the “era of efficiency” was a reference to what he considers as bold layoffs and cost-cutting moves at fellow Club holding Meta Platforms (META), whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg mandated a “year of efficiency.” Zuckerberg’s Meta has gone through two rounds of steep job reductions — 10,000 in March (plus not hiring 5,000 open roles) and 11,000 back in November . Meta ended 2022 with around 86,000 employees, a drop in the bucket compared to Amazon. The company has also sharply cut capital and operational expenses after a period of overspending. We believe Amazon should take a page out of Meta’s playbook. Streamlining costs Jassy reiterated the company’s principle streamlining effort included two rounds of layoffs that ended 27,000 corporate roles in 2023. But as of its fourth-quarter earnings results , Amazon still had more than 1.5 million full and part-time employees. Jim has said that Amazon needs to cut another 200,000 jobs or more to even approach pre-pandemic staffing of around 798,000 in Q4 of 2019. However, Jassy told CNBC on Thursday, regarding further job cuts: “We…
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