Walmart Layoffs: Who is Suresh Kumar, the Indian-origin CTO in news amid latest job cuts
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Earlier this week, Walmart announced plans to lay off 1,500 employees at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, as it looks to cut costs and weather economic uncertainties, affecting the global technology team, ecommerce fulfillment in US stores and advertising business, Walmart Connect.The job cuts are meant to accelerate decision-making and reduce complexities, a memo by chief technology officer (CTO) Suresh Kumar and Walmart US chief executive officer (CEO) John Furner read, as reviewed by Bloomberg News. While eliminating some roles, Walmart is also creating new positions, they said.The latest round of layoffs has drawn criticism from US tech workers. One user on X claimed the vacancies in the Walmart tech team will be filled by H-1B visa holders. One post with Kumar's image claimed without proof that 40% of Walmart's IT department comprises H-1B visa holders from India.Over three decades of his experience, Bengaluru-born Kumar has worked with Microsoft Google and Amazon in various leading capacities. He has been working with Walmart for nearly six years, currently serving as global CTO and chief development officer. In this role, he leads Walmart's technologists across its global businesses, including Walmart US, Sam's Club, and Walmart International. He also oversees global shared services, data, cloud, infrastructure, and information security organisations for the retail major.Before joining Walmart, Kumar was the vice president and general manager at Google. In this role, he oversaw display, video, app advertising, and analytics, managing the advertising revenue and bottomline across platforms like the Google Play Store, Gmail, and YouTube. He led product and engineering teams for key advertising and analytics products including AdSense, AdMob, DV360, AdManager, and Google Analytics (both standard and 360). During his tenure, he drove business growth, introduced new product features, and significantly cut infrastructure and traffic acquisition costs.Before joining Google, Kumar held a senior role at Microsoft as corporate vice president of cloud infrastructure and operations. He led the global planning, delivery, and management of Microsoft's physical cloud infrastructure, including data centres, networks, servers, supply chains, and automation systems. Under his leadership, Microsoft doubled its global cloud footprint and tripled capacity. He also transformed the company's cloud supply chain and operations to enhance scalability, agility, and safety through automation.Prior to Microsoft, Kumar spent 15 years at Amazon in multiple leadership roles. As vice president of technology for retail systems and operations, he played a key role in scaling Amazon's retail business tenfold by automating functions like forecasting, pricing, merchandising, and vendor management. He also oversaw Amazon's retail operations, catalog management, and competitive analysis. Earlier, he led Amazon's retail supply chain and inventory systems.Kumar began his career at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center, where he worked on collaborative supply chain planning and shock protection technologies for portable hard drives.Kumar holds a PhD in engineering from Princeton University. He completed his BTech in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1987.Kumar earned $15.98 million last year at Walmart, according to a regulatory filing. This included base salary of $1.1 million and stock awards worth $12 million.Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump lashed out at Walmart , accusing the retail giant of using tariffs as an excuse to raise prices and urging the company to absorb the cost increases instead of passing them on to American consumers.'Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,' Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
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