Google lays off hundreds of employees across several divisions to save money | Economy

Google is laying off hundreds of people across its digital assistants, hardware and engineering teams to cut costs. The company’s union announced layoffs at the Alphabet Group firm in Silicon Valley on Wednesday evening. “Tonight Google began another round of unnecessary layoffs. Our members and teammates work hard every day to create great products for our users, and the company cannot continue to lay off our colleagues while making billions every quarter. “We will not stop fighting until our jobs are safe!” tweeted the union, which represents a small portion of Google workers.

According to specialist media, among the affected workers are those who work on Google’s voice assistant and the augmented reality hardware team. According to the company, the cuts also affected employees of the company’s central engineering division. Alphabet, the Google group, has about 182,000 employees.

“Throughout the second half of 2023, several of our teams made changes to become more efficient and perform better, and to align their resources with our highest product priorities,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Some teams continue to make similar organizational changes, including global role reductions,” he added. According to the company, affected employees have begun receiving updates and will have the opportunity to apply for open positions in other Google divisions.

Next week marks a year since Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced it would cut about 12,000 jobs worldwide, about 6% of its workforce, to address worsening economic conditions, group CEO Sundar Pichai said. which was then reported to employees in a message. This was the largest staff reduction in the history of the group, which had previously made only minor changes in some segments and divisions.

Over the previous five years, Alphabet more than doubled its workforce, from 88,110 employees at the end of 2017 to 190,234 at the end of last year. The company has hired more than 50,000 people since 2020 alone. After announcing layoffs of 12,000 people, the company continued to make other minor cuts in personnel, the Waze app and other products, while hiring more employees. As of September 30, the company had approximately 182,000 employees.

Alphabet sees the emergence of the ChatGPT bot that Microsoft has chosen as a major threat, as it fears that users will replace many Internet search queries with questions to the artificial intelligence bot that Google responded to with Bard. At a meeting with investors, Google executives vowed to review their operations to identify places where they can cut costs and free up resources to invest in their most important priorities. Overall, last year’s results were again encouraging for the company.

Alphabet, the Google group, accelerated its growth in the third quarter of 2023 thanks to strong digital advertising performance and an improving cloud computing business. Between July and September last year, the group’s revenue was $76.693 million (about €72.400 million at current exchange rates), up 11% on the same period the previous year. According to reports released by the company on Tuesday, the company increased profitability and net income rose 41% to $19.689 million. On a cumulative basis for the nine months of 2023, revenue rose 7% to $221.084 million and profit increased 14.6% , to $53.108 million, despite the cost of severance pay for layoffs.

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