“Over the past year, we made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping our company to address the challenging macro-economic environment while continuing to invest to meet our customers’ needs,” PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman said Tuesday in a statement. “While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do.”
PayPal - which faces possible digital payments competition from Elon Musk’s Twitter - is scheduled to report quarterly results on February 9.
Shares are down about 53% in the past year. They rose 2.3% to close Tuesday at US$81.49.
Total tech cull tops 70,000
In just the past month there have been nearly 50,000 job cuts across the technology sector. Large and small tech companies went on a hiring spree in over the past several years due to a demand for their products, software and services surged with millions of people working remotely. However, even with all of the layoffs announced in recent weeks, most tech companies are still vastly larger than they were three years ago. Here’s a look at some of the companies that have announced layoffs so far.
The cull has been mainly focused in the US, providing an upside for New Zealand firms who have been struggling to fill tech roles domestically or attract talent from offshore.
August 2022
Snap: The parent company of social media platform Snapchat said that it was letting go of 20 per cent of its staff. Snap’s staff has grown to more than 5600 employees in recent years and the company said at the time that even after laying off more than 1000 people, its staff would be larger than it was a year earlier.
Robinhood: The company, whose app helped bring a new generation of investors to the market, announced that it would reduce headcount by about 23 per cent, or approximately 780 people. An earlier round of layoffs last year cut 9 per cent of its workforce.
November 2022
Twitter: Some 3750 or about half of the social media platform’s staff of 7500 was let go after it was acquired by the billionaire CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk.
Lyft: The ride-hailing service said it was cutting 13 per cent of its workforce, almost 700 employees.
Meta: The parent company of Facebook laid off 11,000 people, about 13 per cent of its workforce.
January 2023
Amazon: The e-commerce company said it must cut about 18,000 positions. That’s just a fraction of its 1.5 million-strong global workforce.
Salesforce: The company lays off 10 per cent of its workforce, about 8000 employees.
Coinbase: The cryptocurrency trading platform cuts approximately 20 per cent of its workforce, or about 950 jobs, in a second round of layoffs in less than a year.
Microsoft: The software company said it will cut about 10,000 jobs, almost 5 per cent of its workforce.
Google: The search engine giant becomes the most recent in the industry to say it must adjust, saying 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, would be let go.
Spotify: The music streaming service is cutting 6 per cent of its global workforce. It did not give a specific number of job losses. Spotify reported in its latest annual report that it had about 6600 employees, which implies that 400 jobs are being axed.
SAP: Germany-based SAP, Europe’s biggest software company, said it it cutting up to 3000 jobs worldwide, or about 2.5% of its workforce, after a shop drop in profits.
PayPal: The digital payments company says it will trim about 7 per cent of its total workforce, or about 2000 full-time workers, as it contends with a challenging environment.
With reporting by Herald staff.
- AP
