Google laid off hundreds of employees in several divisions to save costs. economy

Google is laying off hundreds of people working in its digital assistant, hardware and engineering teams in an effort to cut costs. The company’s union announced Wednesday night the start of layoffs at Alphabet Group’s Silicon Valley firm. “Tonight, Google begins 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 afford to fire our associates while making billions every quarter. The union representing a small portion of Google employees tweeted, “We won’t stop fighting until our jobs are safe!”

According to specialized media, the affected workers also include those who work on the Google voice assistant and augmented reality hardware team. According to the company, employees of the company’s central engineering organization have also been affected by the cuts. Google Group Alphabet has about 182,000 employees.

“Throughout the second half of 2023, many of our teams made changes to be more efficient and work better, aligning our resources with our highest product priorities,” a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement. “Some teams continue to make these types of organizational changes, including eliminating some global roles,” he said. According to the company, affected employees have started receiving the news and will have the opportunity to apply for vacant positions in other areas of Google.

Next week marks one year since Google’s parent company Alphabet announced plans to eliminate about 12,000 jobs worldwide, about 6% of its workforce, to address weak economic conditions, according to group CEO Sundar Pichai. Employee. This was the largest reduction in workforce in the history of the group, which until then had only made small adjustments in some segments and divisions.

Over the past five years, Alphabet had more than doubled its workforce, from 88,110 employees at the end of 2017 to 190,234 at the end of last year. The company has hired more than 50,000 people since 2020 alone. After the announcement of 12,000 layoffs, the company continued to make other small cuts in personnel areas in the Waze application and other products, but also hired more employees in parallel. As of September 30, the workforce was approximately 182,000 people.

At Alphabet, the emergence of the ChatGPT bot, which Microsoft has optioned, has been seen as a major threat, as there are fears that users will replace many Internet searches with queries to an artificial intelligence bot, which Google has named Bard. Have hit back with. In a meeting with investors, Google executives promised to analyze their operations to identify places where they could make cuts and free up resources to invest in their biggest priorities. Overall, the results for the company last year have once again been encouraging.

Google Group Alphabet accelerated its growth in the third quarter of 2023 thanks to a good performance in digital advertising and an improvement in its cloud computing business. Between July and September last year, the group achieved revenues of $76,693 million (about 72,400 million euros at the current exchange rate), 11% more than the same period last year. According to the accounts published by the company this Tuesday, the company’s margins improved and net profit increased by 41% to $19,689 million. In the cumulative amount for the first nine months of 2023, revenue increased 7% to $221,084 million, and profit increased 14.6% to $53,108 million, despite the cost of severance pay for terminations.

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