Google is laying off hundreds of people working on its digital assistant, hardware and engineering teams in an effort to cut costs. The company's union announced the start of layoffs at the Silicon Valley firm of the Alphabet group on Wednesday night. “Tonight, Google has begun another round of unnecessary layoffs. Our members and teammates work hard every day to create great products for our users, and the company can't keep laying off our colleagues while making billions every quarter. “We will not stop fighting until our jobs are safe!” tweeted the union, which represents a small portion of Google workers.
Among the affected workers are those who work on the Google voice assistant and the augmented reality hardware team, according to specialized media. Employees in the company's central engineering organization have also been affected by the cuts, according to the company. Alphabet, the Google group, has about 182,000 employees.
”Throughout the second half of 2023, several of our teams made changes to be more efficient and work better, and to align their resources with their highest product priorities,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement. “Some teams continue to make these types of organizational changes, including some global role eliminations,” he added. Affected staff have begun to receive the news and will have the opportunity to apply for open positions in other areas of Google, according to the company.
Next week marks one year since Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced the elimination of around 12,000 jobs worldwide, close to 6% of the workforce, to address weakening economic conditions, according to The group's CEO, Sundar Pichai, then announced: in a message to employees. It was the largest workforce cut in the history of the group, which until then had only made rather small adjustments in some segments and divisions.
In the previous five years, Alphabet had more than doubled its workforce, from the 88,110 employees it had at the end of 2017 to the 190,234 it had at the end of last year. Since 2020 alone, the company had hired more than 50,000 people. After the announcement of the 12,000 layoffs, the company continued to make other minor cuts in personnel areas, in the Waze application and in other products, but also hiring more staff in parallel. As of September 30, the workforce was around 182,000 people.
At Alphabet, the emergence of the ChatGPT bot, on which Microsoft has opted, has been seen as a great threat, as it is feared that users will replace many internet searches with questions to the artificial intelligence bot, which Google has counterattacked with Bard. In a meeting with investors, Google executives pledged to analyze their operations to identify places where they can make cuts and free up resources to invest in their biggest priorities. All in all, the results have once again been buoyant for the company last year.
Alphabet, the Google group, accelerated its growth in the third quarter of 2023 thanks to the good performance of digital advertising and the improvement of its cloud computing business. Between July and September of last year, the group achieved revenues of 76,693 million dollars (about 72,400 million euros at the current exchange rate), 11% more than in the same period of the previous year. The company improved margins and net profit soared by 41%, to $19,689 million, according to the accounts published this Tuesday by the company. In the accumulated amount of the first nine months of 2023, revenue grew by 7%, to $221,084 million, and profit increased by 14.6%, to $53,108 million, despite the costs of severance pay for dismissals.
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