18,000 jobs at Amazon, 12,000 at Google’s parent company: the scale of job losses in the tech industry is making headlines. However, the high numbers are mainly due to the fact that the companies quickly expanded their workforce for their company during the corona boom. After the cuts, you still have significantly more employees than before the pandemic.
Amazon: The corona pandemic with closed stores gave the online retailer a huge business boost. That’s why he needed more people. The number of full-time and part-time employees doubled from 800,000 at the end of 2019 to more than 1.6 million at the end of 2021. People are now ordering less again, also because money is no longer so easy in times of high prices. Jobs were already lost last year and in January Amazon announced it was cutting 18,000 jobs. Office jobs are being hit hard.
meta: During the pandemic, many small businesses turned to Facebook ads to boost their business. Meta made good money and also hired a lot. At the end of 2019, the group had 45,000 employees, three years later there were already more than 87,000. Then 11,000 jobs were cut in November. Meta feels the reticence of advertisers who are more careful with their money. Also, the Tiktok app is a strong rival in the battle for ad dollars — and Apple’s privacy protection measures on the iPhone made ads on Facebook less efficient. At the same time, founder Mark Zuckerberg is investing many billions in the development of virtual ‘metaverse’ worlds.
Alphabet: The Google parent company also earns its money almost exclusively from online advertising and is feeling the effects of the slowdown in the digital advertising market. And Alphabet also expanded its workforce during the pandemic: from about 119,000 employees at the end of 2019 to almost 187,000 in September 2022. At the same time, Alphabet also has high costs: Google’s profits help fund future projects, such as robot axis from Waymo or delivery of drones, which costs billions. The cuts also affect such areas.
Microsoft: The Windows giant has focused heavily on the cloud business in recent years with online services from the network – just right for network work in the corona pandemic. The number of employees at Microsoft also grew rapidly due to acquisitions: at the end of the past financial year in mid-2022, the group had around 221,000 employees, compared to 144,000 three years earlier. Microsoft recently faced headwinds in a traditional segment: the decline in PC sales in a saturated market caused the Windows business to shrink by 39 percent. Microsoft is cutting 10,000 jobs, but plans to hire more people in the future.
Twitter: The drastic loss of the short message service is a special case. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, as the new owner, claimed that Twitter had too many employees — and had laid off half of its roughly 7,000 employees. Others also came under pressure, so that, according to media reports, there are now only about 1,300 employees left. Musk needs to save money: He saddled Twitter with billions of dollars in debt for the acquisition, which must now be honored — and ad revenue is said to have collapsed by 40 percent due to advertiser reluctance.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
