After the announcement made yesterday by the music platform Spotify, to leave 600 employees, there are already more than 60,000 layoffs that some of the largest technology companies anticipated at the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023.
Spotify, the world leader in audio platforms, will cut 6% of its workforce, thus joining the wave of layoffs announced by the technology giants. This is the largest staff cut in the history of this Swedish company founded in 2006 in Stockholm and which reached more than 500 million subscribers. “In retrospect, I have been too ambitious investing faster than the growth of our turnover,” said the company’s CEO and co-founder, Daniel Ek.
Spotify’s announcement follows a series of layoff plans announced by big tech groups in recent weeks. This is how Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced on January 20 that it will eliminate some 12,000 jobs worldwide, that is, a little more than 6% of its nearly 187,000 jobs. Sundar Pichai, the head of Alphabet, considered in an email addressed to his employees that the situation forced his group to reduce its workforce, after two years of “spectacular growth” in which there were many hires.
The American computer giant Microsoft, citing economic uncertainty and changes in customer priorities, announced on January 18 that it would lay off some 10,000 employees by the end of March, that is, just under 5% of its 221,000 workers. . The Redwood-based company had already made two layoffs: one in July 2022, which affected less than 1% of the workforce, and another in October, in which 1,000 positions were eliminated.
But this is not all, as the electronic commerce giant Amazon announced on January 5 that it would cut “a little more than 18,000” jobs worldwide, through a layoff plan that will mainly affect the warehouses managed by the group and to the human resources department. The distribution group undertook many hires during the covid-19 pandemic to respond to demand, doubling its headcount between 2020 and early 2022.
Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – also announced in November the abolition of 11,000 jobs, that is, 13% of its workforce. It was the first time in its history that the company announced a restructuring. The financial performance in the third quarter of 2022 was disappointing, with a sharp drop in its business volume and profits, in addition to a stagnation in its number of users.
Finally, Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, parent company of the popular Snapchat application, announced in August 2022 a restructuring to cut about 20% of its workforce, that is, more than 1,200 employees. Snapchat – whose number of users is growing – is nevertheless in a delicate situation because it generates less and less income.