Meta initiates 3rd round of layoffs

Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta Platforms Inc has initiated the last round of layoffs today as part of the company's restructuring plan to slash around 10,000 jobs. This time, ad sales, marketing, and partnership departments could face the axe, suggest reports.

Meta announced a three-part layoff round in March 2023, announcing 10,000 more layoffs in a series of rounds after firing around 11,000 employees in November last year. They were the largest layoffs in its 18-year history after a dramatic slowdown in Meta's revenue in 2022.

Amid the development, the company shares were trading 0.4% down in the pre-market hours.

Zuckerberg said the restructuring plans are focussed on flattening the organisation, canceling lower-priority projects, and reducing hiring rates.

As of November 8, 2022, the company had 87,000 employees globally. "Overall, we expect to reduce our team size by around 10,000 people and to close around 5,000 additional open roles that we haven't yet hired," he had earlier said.

Mark said Meta's timelines for "international teams will also look different", and that local leaders will follow up with more details. After restructuring, Meta plans to lift hiring and transfer freezes in each group, and the company targets this summer to complete the “analysis”.

Notably, despite the company recording a 4% year-on-year decline in revenue for the quarter ending December 2022, Meta’s annual profit stood at $23 billion in 2022.

Zuckerberg thinks "this new economic reality" will continue for many years. "Higher interest rates lead to the economy running leaner, more geopolitical instability leads to more volatility, and increased regulation leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation," he said in an earlier post.

The year 2022 and the first five months of 2023 have witnessed massive layoffs across companies all over the world. The tech sector, especially, has been the most affected as companies grapple with cost-cutting measures amid dwindling revenues.

Telecom major Vodafone Group last week announced to trim 11,000 jobs in the next three years with both headquarters and local markets simplification as the Berkshire-based company looks to become “leaner and simpler.”

Earlier this month, LinkedIn and Cognizant laid off 716 and 3,500 employees, respectively. In January, Microsoft announced it would lay off about 10,000 employees, or 5% of its workforce by the end of the third quarter of 2023. Amazon has laid off 27,000 employees. Google also sacked around 12,000 roles in one of the highest headcount reductions in the past year.