Posted Sep 29, 2022, 9:38 PM
The crisis does not spare the digital giants. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has decided to freeze hiring and is not ruling out restructuring to cut costs, according to Bloomberg. It was Mark Zuckerberg himself who announced it during a meeting with his employees.
“I had hoped that the economy would have stabilized now, but that does not seem to be the case yet, so we want to plan things out,” the CEO stressed to his teams.
The group has been experiencing a slowdown in advertising revenue for months. It also recorded a historic drop in the number of subscribers on Facebook. As a result, after years of growth, Meta experienced its first quarter of revenue decline this year.
Reassure investors
“For the first 18 years of the business, we grew rapidly every year, then more recently our revenue was flat or slightly down for the first time,” he told staff Thursday.
To reassure the Stock Exchange, its leader had promised in July that he was going to tighten costs, and redirect his resources to other sectors. Its goal is to cut spending by about $3 billion from what was planned.
“A lot of teams are going to shrink so we can shift the energy to other areas,” he said. With among the priorities, Reels, Meta’s TikTok competitor. A week earlier, the “Wall Street Journal” had mentioned an upcoming cut of 10% of the workforce.
Meta had more than 83,500 employees at the end of June, and recruited another 5,700 employees in the second quarter. The company would be “a bit smaller” by the end of 2023, the CEO warned.
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