Amazon will be shutting its online learning platform, Amazon Academy, where it prepared students for competitive exams, in India, the global tech giant said on Thursday.
The company said it will begin winding down the unit in a phased manner beginning August 2023 and will initiate a full refund of the fees that it received from students in the current batch.
As per the company’s website, Amazon Academy was a platform for the students who were preparing for the joint entrance examination (JEE) and the national eligibility cum entrance (NEET) categories. The company, however, said its students would have access to the course material till October 2024.
“At Amazon, we think big, experiment, and invest in new ideas to delight customers. We also continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products and services to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
“Following an assessment, we have made the decision to discontinue Amazon Academy. We are winding down this programme in a phased manner to take care of current customers.”
While Amazon did not elaborate on the reasons behind the decision, media reports suggest that the move was part of the company’s ongoing cost-cutting measures. Further, the shuttering down of Amazon Academy comes at a time when the company has also decided that it would be firing about 10,000 employees globally.
Amazon’s chief executive officer Andy Jassy has said the layoffs at the company will extend into the next year. Amazon Academy, which was launched less than two years ago, will be the latest to exit the Indian edtech space which has veered off course as demand for online education wanes.
Several competitors such as Facebook-backed Unacademy, Sequoia-backed Byju’s and Accel-backed Vedantu, which prepare students for the JEE and NEET, have all seen a cash crunch and are preparing for a time when edtechs fall out of favour.
To rationalise operations and conserve cash, edtech unicorns have been exiting certain categories and been laying off employees. So far in 2022, new-age companies have fired about 16,000, of which the edtech sector alone has seen about 6,000 jobs being cut, the highest from a single industry.
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