Amazon reportedly cutting 'hundreds of corporate jobs and reallocating money to Alexa'

The company is reportedly shifting its focus into into fast-growing areas like Alexa. Photo / AP

Amazon is cutting hundreds of corporate jobs in consumer business at its Seattle headquarters, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.

The company is instead shifting those resources into fast-growing areas like its work on voice assistant Alexa.

The job cuts, rare for the world's largest online retailer, are in the low hundreds, the person told the Seattle Times on the condition of anonymity, according to the Daily Mail.

Amazon determined through planning for 2018 that certain mature areas of its business no longer required as much staff for the results it was seeking, the person said.

It was unclear which specific teams inside Amazon were affected.

These new cuts come after the company carried out hiring freezes over the past few months across multiple departments.

Amazon's consumer organization includes its retail and marketplace businesses, as well as programs like its food delivery service Amazon Restaurants.

Seattle-based Amazon has been on a hiring tear, creating some 130,000 jobs worldwide in 2017, not including the jobs created at Whole Foods locations.

David Limp, senior vice president of Devices and Services at Amazon, smiles as he displays a new Amazon Echo. The speaker is powered by Amazon's Alexa voice assistant. Photo / AP

The company also has plans to open a second headquarters in North America, anticipating up to 50,000 more jobs there. That location is still up for grabs.

Its full-time and part-time headcount surged 66 percent in the fourth quarter to 566,000 from a year earlier. That figure includes employees at Whole Foods Market, which Amazon acquired in a $13.7 billion ($18.8b) deal last year.

But many of the corporate jobs are going to areas of soaring profit, like cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services, or areas where Amazon sees potential, like voice-controlled computing.

"Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic, and we far exceeded them," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder and chief executive, in a statement earlier this month.

"We don't see positive surprises of this magnitude very often - expect us to double down."

Amazon hopes Alexa will become a regular part of consumers' lives and will spur shopping orders by voice.

The company currently has 3,900 jobs open in Seattle, and staff facing job cuts can apply for them.

The company has contracts for 1 million square feet or more of new office space in the city to hire still more employees.