Facebook parent company Meta will lay off another 10,000 employees, the company’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday, the second-such massive round of layoffs as the company drastically cuts costs – but Meta’s share price continues to climb.
Key Takeaways
- The layoffs will mostly take place over the next two months across Meta’s business, recruiting and technology teams, Zuckerberg wrote in a blog post titled “Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency.”
- That amounts to roughly 12% of Meta’s workforce and follows the company’s firing of 11,000 employees in November.
- Meta will also close 5,000 job openings.
- Shares of the Silicon Valley firm rallied more than 6% as of 12 ET, as Wall Street continued to cheer on Meta’s commitment to trim costs and improve its bottom line.
Zuckerberg cited higher interest rates, a volatile geopolitical state and additional regulatory scrutiny as contributing factors to the layoffs, saying the “new economic reality…leads to slower growth and increased costs of innovation.”
This suboptimal macroeconomic environment “will continue for many years,” Zuckerberg predicted.
The Washington Post reported last month Meta was preparing to lay off thousands of more employees, while the Wall Street Journal reported last week the fresh round of firings could match November’s in scale.
At an all-hands meeting following the November cuts, Zuckerberg said the firings “minimise[d] the chance of having to do broad layoffs like this for the foreseeable future,” according to the Post. Meta is among several large technology titans to dramatically reduce its headcount in recent months, as Alphabet and Microsoft each laid off 10,000 employees earlier this year.
Big Number
53%. That’s how much Meta’s stock is up year-to-date, the second-largest gain of any company listed on the S&P 500, which is up about 0.8% this year. Meta shares are still down more than 50% from its September 2021 all-time high.
This story was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
