Google Group Alphabet is cutting 12,000 jobs

Around 12,000 jobs are to be lost worldwide, according to the Bloomberg financial service and the Wall Street Journal on Friday, citing an email from company boss Sundar Pichai to employees.

This corresponds to around six percent of the workforce. Areas outside the core business should therefore be more affected. from alphabet there was initially no official information.

Just this week, Microsoft announced the elimination of 10,000 jobs. Before that, Amazon announced that it would cut 18,000 jobs and the Facebook group Meta of 11,000 jobs. With the booming business in the corona pandemic, the tech companies had increased their number of employees, in some cases significantly. had alphabet almost 186,800 employees as of the end of September according to the latest available figures. That was around 36,750 more than a year earlier.

The decision to cut jobs weighed heavily on him, Pichai wrote. “And I take full responsibility for the decisions that brought us here.” After the “dramatic growth” in the pandemic, the workforce was built up “in a different economic reality than today”. the alphabetThe share was up a good three percent in premarket trading after the announcement.

Recently, the business development of the tech giants has slowed down, among other things due to economic concerns and high inflation. Google and Meta earn their money almost exclusively with online advertising – and felt the thriftiness of large and small companies. At Amazon, in addition to the reduced willingness of consumers to buy, the increasing logistics costs had an impact.

The scale of the cuts alphabet roughly at the level of Microsoft, where almost five percent of the jobs will be lost. Meta even cut 13 percent of the jobs. At Amazon, with its 1.5 million employees, mainly in logistics centers, 18,000 jobs only make up a small proportion, but the office jobs are badly affected. Twitter stands alone, where tech billionaire Elon Musk, as the new owner, cut about half of the approximately 7,000 employees.

Pichai hinted that at alphabet Areas outside the core business will be more affected: the workforce should be aligned with the group’s central priorities. Above all, this includes the focus on the development of artificial intelligence, which was decided a few years ago.

A specialty of alphabet is that Google generates practically all of the revenue and thus co-finances future projects such as robotaxis from Waymo or delivery drones under the umbrella of the group. These areas can be alphabet Costs billions, but has been trying to bring spending under control for some time.