Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) announced its cutting another 10,000 jobs and 5,000 open roles at the company in the coming months as part of its Year of Efficiency plan.
The company announced the first round of cuts in November, which culminated in 11,000 job cuts or roughly 13 per cent of its workforce at the time. At its peak in 2022, Meta had grown to 87,000 employees globally with a portion of that coming since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As I’ve talked about efficiency this year, I’ve said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long term vision,” said Zuckerberg, in an open letter to Meta employees.
Meta posted falling profits and its third consecutive quarter of declining revenue early last month. On the same day, the company indicated it would buy back as much as $40 billion of its own stock.
Zuckerberg pointed the finger at rising interest rates in the United States, as well as greater geopolitical instability and increased regulation as some of the factors behind the slowdown.
“This will be tough and there’s no way around that,” Zuckerberg said. “Over the next couple of months, org leaders will announce restructuring plans focused on flattening our orgs, canceling lower priority projects, and reducing our hiring rates.”
Flatter is faster. Leaner is better. In person is superior. $META Yes. Yes. Yes. No founder deserves more credit for leading the turn around from Age of Excess to Efficiency than Mark Zuckerberg. Amazing. https://t.co/4aOkzzIJGP https://t.co/eNQm6WYu14
— Brad Gerstner (@altcap) March 14, 2023
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Meta shows unshakeable confidence in metaverse
Zuckerberg displayed confidence for some of his more controversial decisions over the past few years, including throwing billions of dollars a year behind its metaverse project. The metaverse is an open world virtual world concept so integral to the future of the company that he renamed the company after it.
“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products. We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing,” said Zuckerberg.
“Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”
Preceding the company’s November layoffs, some of Meta’s shareholders requested Zuckerberg abandon the project, given that long term projections show the investment not paying off for more than a decade. Instead, he insisted that he was looking towards the future, making the metaverse would a high priority growth area.
The aim is for a leaner organization, which will execute its highest priorities in a more efficient manner. Trimming the fat in this case means cancelling lower priority projects.
Restructuring and layoffs at Meta’s are expected in late April and in business groups in late May.
Meta shares rose on Tuesday $13.12 and closed at $194.02 on the NASDAQ exchange.
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