Under the environment of Internet companies “reducing costs and increasing efficiency”, Bilibili also began to lay off staff.On May 20, The Paper reporter learned from the internal staff of Station B that a new round of layoffs is currently underway at Station B, and the hardest hit area is the game business.Employees said that the overall layoff ratio of the game business reached 20%-30%, of which individual projects reached 70%. Some employees jokingly called this “graduation season” opening.
Between the end of last year and the beginning of this year, news of layoffs has been reported in the game business of Station B. Internal employees said that the new round of layoffs started in May, among which the proportion of self-developed game projects was relatively high, and only a few of them were retained.
“It’s basically a temporary notice this time,” a laid-off employee told The Paper. “The current termination compensation is N+1, and there is basically no room for negotiation.”
A number of insiders at Station B told reporters that the main reason for the layoffs was that the profitability of the game business failed to meet expectations. The 2021 financial report shows that the annual revenue of the mobile game business of Station B last year was 5.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%, accounting for 26.27% of the total revenue. Its revenue growth has continued to slow down, and it is no longer the largest source of revenue for Station B.
According to the reporter’s understanding, Bilibili mainly operates and distributes games through exclusive distribution, joint agency and self-research. Bilibili had high hopes for the self-research game business. When the second quarter financial report was released last year, Bilibili CEO Chen Rui once said that the current game self-research team of Bilibili has more than 1,000 people, and several projects are being developed in parallel and will be launched next year and the year after. “From the current business scale of Station B, game self-research is the first focus at the current stage. It is predicted that in a few years, half of the game business revenue of Station B will come from self-developed products.”
However, with the progress of the game version number issuance, the self-developed business that requires a lot of cost is facing increasing pressure on profitability. The latest financial report of Station B shows that its losses have not narrowed. The net loss in the fourth quarter of 2021 was 2.096 billion yuan, compared with 843 million yuan in the same period last year, an increase of 149% year-on-year.
In this regard, Chen Rui stated that revenue growth will be the core of Bilibili’s strategy. “To reduce costs and increase efficiency, we must control all the money that should not be spent, and increase the efficiency of the money that should be spent.” CFO Fan Xin said that Station B plans to achieve non-GAAP breakeven in 2024.
As of press time, Station B has not yet responded to the matter.