Seemingly taking note of other Big Tech companies, Meta will reportedly begin conducting massive layoffs this week according to the Wall Street Journal.
The company is expected to make an announcement as soon as this Wednesday, where job cuts will reportedly impact thousands of workers.
Meta’s presence on the stock market has been nothing short of disappointing over the last year, with the organization predicting a low return on the holiday quarter and massive costs that could slash $67 billion off of its market value.
Like Meta’s fellow technology giants, there’s a variety of reasons this is occurring. Inflation, slowed economic progress, competition and more have caused a slowdown in earnings.
However, unique to Meta is the privacy policy change Apple recently implemented, which allows Apple users to opt in and out of data tracking — the crux of Meta’s targeted ad revenue.
In addition to decreased accessibility to Meta users’ data, investors have expressed concern over the company’s commitment to the still-infant metaverse, with one shareholder suggesting that layoffs could help get the company’s “mojo back.”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, already indicated that job cuts were coming during the firm’s last earnings call.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high priority growth areas,” said Zuckerberg.
“So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today.”
