LOS ANGELES, Feb 8 (Reuters) - Walt Disney Co (DIS.N) on Wednesday announced a sweeping restructuring under recently reinstated CEO Bob Iger, cutting 7,000 jobs as part of an effort to save $5.5 billion in costs and make its streaming business profitable.
The layoffs represent an estimated 3.6% of Disney's global workforce.
(CNN) — Zoom on Tuesday said it will lay off about 1,300 employees, or approximately 15% of its staff, becoming the latest tech company to announce significant job cuts as a pandemic-fueled surge in demand for digital services wanes.
New York(CNN) — Boeing plans to cut about 2,000 white-collar jobs in finance and human resources, and it will be shifting some of that work to an outside contractor in India.
FedEx is cutting more than 10% of its officers and directors, CEO Raj Subramaniam announced Wednesday, as the company slashes corporate jobs to cut costs amid cooling consumer demand.
"Unfortunately, this was a necessary action to become a more efficient, agile organization. It is my responsibility to look critically at the business and determine where we can be stronger by better aligning the size of our network with customer demand," Subramaniam said in a letter to FedEx team members.
Dan Schulman, CEO, Paypal speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 23, 2020.
Adam Galacia | CNBC
PayPal on Tuesday announced plans to lay off 2,000 employees, or around 7% of its workforce, according to a release posted to the company's website.
President and CEO Dan Schulman wrote in the release that PayPal is working to address the "challenging macroeconomic environment." He said the company has made progress focusing resources on core priorities and rightsizing its cost structure, but that there is more work to be done.
AMSTERDAM, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Dutch health technology company Philips (PHG.AS) will scrap another 6,000 jobs worldwide as it tries to restore its profitability and improve the safety of its products following a recall of respiratory devices that knocked off 70% of its market value.
Half of the job cuts will be made this year, the company said on Monday, adding that the other half will be realised by 2025.
Salesforce, the business software giant, said on Wednesday that it planned to lay off 10 percent of its work force, or about 8,000 employees, and scale back office space because of concerns about the economy.
"The environment remains challenging, and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions," Marc Benioff, the company's co-chief executive, said in a note to employees announcing the cuts.
BERLIN—Software company SAP SE joined the ranks of tech companies announcing job cuts this year, saying it would shed up to 3,000 positions after a steep profit drop in late 2022.
After growing rapidly at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, technology companies have been laying off workers mainly in the U.S., with large employers such as Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. shedding thousands of jobs last year.
Hasbro said Thursday it would eliminate around 1,000 employee positions and warned of weak holiday-quarter results.
Shares of the toy maker fell more than 6% in extended trading.
New York(CNN) — BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, is cutting about 500 jobs following a period of rapid hiring.
A spokesperson for BlackRock told CNN on Wednesday that the layoffs amount to less than 3% of the company's workforce.
BlackRock (BLK), a leader on Wall Street, has been on a major hiring spree in recent years.
The company hasn't conducted a major round of layoffs since 2019 and has increased its headcount by about 22% over the past three years, a BlackRock spokesperson told MarketWatch, adding the job cuts are coming in the face of an "unprecedented market environment."
Jan 9 (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group (GS.N) will start cutting thousands of jobs across the firm from Wednesday, two sources familiar with the move said, as it prepares for a tough economic environment.
Just over 3,000 employees will be let go, one of the sources said, but the final number is yet to be determined. That scale of layoffs would be the largest since the 2008 financial crisis, one of the sources said.
Vimeo has chopped down its workforce by 11 percent in a new sweep of layoffs, the video hosting platform said Wednesday in a company blog post.
"Today we made the decision to reduce the size of our team by 11%. Everyone whose job is impacted has received an email and an invite for a meeting with their team leader and HR," read the letter from Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud, who thanked the impacted employees for their contributions. "This was a very hard decision that impacts each of us deeply. It is also the right thing to do to enable Vimeo to be a more focused and successful company, operating with the necessary discipline in an uncertain economic environment."
Salesforce, the business software giant, said on Wednesday that it planned to lay off 10 percent of its work force, or about 8,000 employees, and scale back office space because of concerns about the economy.
"The environment remains challenging, and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions," Marc Benioff, the company's co-chief executive, said in a note to employees announcing the cuts.
Jan 23 (Reuters) - Spotify Technology SA (SPOT.N) said on Monday it plans to cut 6% of its workforce and would take a related charge of up to nearly $50 million, adding to the massive layoffs in the technology sector in preparation for a possible recession.
The tech industry is facing a demand downturn after two years of pandemic-powered growth during which it had hired aggressively. That has led firms from Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) to Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) to shed thousands of jobs.
"Over the last few months we've made a considerable effort to rein in costs, but it simply hasn't been enough," Chief Executive Daniel Elk said in a blog post announcing the roughly 600 job cuts.
Since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004, the Silicon Valley company has steadily hired more employees. At the end of September, it had amassed its largest-ever number of workers, totaling 87,314 people.
But on Wednesday, the company — now renamed Meta — began cutting jobs, and deeply.
Meta said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force, in what amounted to the company's most significant job cuts. The layoffs were made across departments and regions, with areas like recruiting and business teams affected more than others. The divisions that were not cut as steeply included engineers working on projects related to the metaverse, the immersive online world that Mr. Zuckerberg has bet big on, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
The Amazon Spheres, part of the Amazon headquarters campus, right, in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon on Wednesday will begin a fresh round of job cuts in what's expected to become the largest workforce cuts in its 28-year history.
Earlier this month, CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs would affect more than 18,000 employees, primarily in its human resources and stores divisions. Amazon said in November it was looking to cut staff, including in its devices and recruiting organizations. CNBC reported at the time that the company was looking to lay off about 10,000 employees.
Jan 20 (Reuters) - Google's parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) is cutting about 12,000 jobs as it faces "a different economic reality", it said in a staff memo, doubling down on artificial intelligence (AI) and axing staff who support experimental projects.
The job cuts affect 6% of its workforce, and follows thousands of layoffs at tech giants including Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) who are downsizing after a pandemic-led hiring spree left them flabby in a weak economy.
IBM joined the wave of layoffs by technology companies on Wednesday, saying it will shed 3,900 workers.
By Supantha Mukherjee and Anna Ringstrom
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish telecom operator Telia Company on Thursday reported fourth-quarter core profit slightly below estimates, proposed a lower dividend and said it would cut 1,500 jobs this year, more than previously planned.
The logo of Microsoft is seen outside their offices in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, Israel, Dec 27, 2022. REUTERS/Rami Amichay
18 Jan 2023 10:22PM (Updated: 19 Jan 2023 10:09AM)
DAVOS, Switzerland: Microsoft Corp on Wednesday (Jan 18) said it would eliminate 10,000 jobs and take a US$1.2 billion charge to earnings, as its cloud-computing customers reassess their spending and the company braces for potential recession.
The layoffs add to the tens of thousands announced in recent months across the technology sector, which has downshifted following a strong growth period during the pandemic.
The news comes even as the software maker is set to ramp up spending in generative artificial intelligence that the industry sees as the new bright spot.
In a note to employees, CEO Satya Nadella attempted to address the divergent outlook for different parts of the business.
Customers wanted to "optimize their digital spend to do more with less" and "exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one," he said. "At the same time, the next major wave of computing is being born with advances in AI."
Nadella said the layoffs, affecting less than 5 per cent of Microsoft's workforce, would conclude by the end of March, with notifications beginning Wednesday.
However, Microsoft would keep hiring in "strategic areas," he said. AI is likely to be one of those areas. Nadella this week touted AI to world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, claiming the technology would transform its products and touch people around the globe.
Microsoft has looked at adding to its US$1-billion stake in OpenAI, the startup behind the Silicon Valley chatbot sensation known as ChatGPT, which Microsoft plans to soon market through its cloud service.
Shares of the Redmond, Washington-based company ended 2 per cent lower on Wednesday.
The announcement corresponds with the start of layoffs at its retail and cloud-computing rival Amazon.com Inc, which started notifying employees Wednesday of its own 18,000-person job cuts.
In an internal memo seen by Reuters, Amazon said that affected workers in the United States, Canada and Costa Rica would be informed by the end of the day. Employees in China will be notified after the Chinese New Year.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc has announced cuts of 11,000 jobs, while cloud-based software company Salesforce Inc said it would cut 10 per cent of its 80,000-member workforce.
Overall, in 2022, more than 97,000 job cuts in tech were announced, the highest for the sector since 2002, when 131,000 cuts were announced, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
NEW YORK • Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in a statement on Thursday reported declining sales and announced it would cut jobs and reduce executive pay, saying the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted supply chains for data centre hardware.
The company, which has its regional headquarters in Singapore, said it was putting in place a plan to cut costs, with a goal of US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) in savings by the end of fiscal 2022. Measures will including simplifying its product portfolio and supply chain as well as changing customer support, marketing efforts and real estate strategies, HPE said in the statement.
"It definitely was a tough quarter by every measure and I'm disappointed in the performance, but I don't see this as an indication of our capabilities," chief executive Antonio Neri said in an interview.
"This was clearly driven by supply chain disruptions because of coronavirus", including a shortage of chip components from China, disrupted logistics and social distancing guidelines in some regions, he added.
When contacted by The Straits Times, HPE said it has about 1,300 staff in Singapore. The company said there have not been any country-specific announcements regarding its cost-cutting plan. It did not comment on whether there will be any job cuts in Singapore.
Mr Neri said he expected HPE's sales to "recover sequentially", with the third quarter posting better results than the second and the fourth improving further. Still, he said, it is unknown just how bad the economic downturn will be.
Revenue fell 16 per cent to US$6 billion in the period ended April 30, HPE said. Analysts, on average, expected US$6.19 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Profit, excluding some items, was 22 cents a share, compared with an average estimate of 28 cents.
The company withdrew its annual profit forecast last month, citing uncertainty from the Covid-19 pandemic. HPE shares dropped about 5 per cent in extended trading after closing at US$10.36 in New York. The stock has dropped 35 per cent this year.
Mr Neri has struggled to spark sales growth at the computing and networking company, which has seen year-on-year revenue declines in all but one quarter since the company split from HP Inc in 2015. Competing with larger hardware rival Dell Technologies and dominant cloud computing companies such as Amazon.com and Microsoft, HPE has hitched its future to edge computing, which distributes data-processing capacity closer to customers rather than at centralised data centres. More immediately, the company has sought to support sales by offering US$2 billion of financing for clients trying to preserve cash in the pandemic.
Under the company's three-year plan to reduce expenses, senior executives including Mr Neri will take 20 to 25 per cent cuts to their base salaries, and the board reduced each director's cash retainer by 25 per cent from July to the end of the fiscal year.
The hardware maker will consolidate offices where possible, Mr Neri said. He expects more than half of HPE's employees will not return to the office full time, dropping in for meetings and collaboration when necessary.
The number of employees who may lose their jobs under the cost-cutting plan has not been determined, Mr Neri said. The company will spend the next few months working out the details and evaluating how much it can save in other areas. HPE has instituted some temporary pay cuts and frozen employee pay rises and promotions, executives said on a conference call after the results were announced.
Revenue fell 16 per cent to US$6 billion in the period ended April 30, HPE said. Analysts, on average, expected US$6.19 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
In the fiscal second quarter, revenue declined in all of HPE's business segments. Server sales dropped 20 per cent to US$2.64 billion and storage hardware fell 18 per cent. HPE's integration of supercomputer maker Cray is on track and should yield synergies by next year, executives said.
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TOKYO • Nissan Motor is planning to cut more than 20,000 jobs across the world, as it grapples with closed factories and showrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic, Kyodo News reported.
TOKYO • Nissan Motor is planning to cut more than 20,000 jobs across the world, as it grapples with closed factories and showrooms amid the coronavirus pandemic, Kyodo News reported.
The outbreak is forcing the Japanese carmaker to cut back on production, and it is also considering restructuring measures in the country, the news agency reported.
The job reductions are part of a mid-term reorganisation plan that Nissan is due to unveil next Thursday, Kyodo said.
The reduction is much larger than the 12,500 staff cuts Nissan announced in the middle of last year. Nissan has been in turmoil since the November 2018 arrest of former chairman Carlos Ghosn, with an ageing car line-up and management paralysis denting its outlook.
The automaker warned last month that it expects to post a loss for the latest fiscal year through March, as the pandemic shuttered dealerships in major markets and the economic fallout hurt consumer demand for new cars.
A representative for Nissan declined to comment on the report.
Nissan plans to cut about 300 billion yen (S$4 billion) in annual fixed costs and book restructuring charges as the pandemic further depresses its sales, a person with knowledge of the measures said last week.
The automaker will phase out the Datsun brand, shut down one production line in addition to the recently closed operation in Indonesia, and reach the reduced spending target this year by cutting marketing, research and other costs, the person said.
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