An employee cleans a window at Apple Inc.’s new Canton Road store in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Hong Kong, China.
Xaume Olleros | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Many of the biggest technology companies are laying off staff as fears of a recession rises. But the job cuts come after a few years of rapid expansion.
On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it will eliminate 10,000 employees, reducing its workforce by 5%, and Amazon began conducting layoffs that will eventually slash 18,000 jobs.
While each company is slightly different, most companies going through layoffs are blaming macroeconomic conditions and the possibility of a future recession as the reason for their belt-tightening.
But an underappreciated factor is how rapidly tech companies ramped up hiring over the last two years.
In 2020, widespread Covid lockdowns made internet applications more important to people, supercharging business for many tech companies. As sales and profit continued to rise in 2021, they continued to add huge numbers of employees in the hopes that the success they were seeing would become a new baseline. It didn’t work out that way. Growth is slowing, and companies are now having to readjust.
Apple is a major exception: It did not appreciably increase its rate of hiring over the last two years, and also has not announced any layoffs.
A review of SEC filings shows how rapidly the other biggest tech companies grew during the pandemic.
Microsoft had 221,000 full time employees at the end of June 2022, the most recent official figure that’s available. That was a 40,000 employee jump from the same time in 2021, a 22% percent increase in staff. The year before that, Microsoft added 18,000 employees, an 11% increase.
In a note about Microsoft layoffs, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said that the tech sector had to spend money during the pandemic to keep up with elevated demand.
“Redmond needed to aggressively hire along with the rest of the tech sector and spend money like 1980’s Rock Stars to keep pace with eye-popping demand,” Ives wrote in a Wednesday note.
Amazon is more complicated than Microsoft because it has a huge hourly workforce for its warehouses, as well as the corporate office employees seen in most tech companies.
Still, Amazon grew voraciously in 2021, adding 310,000 jobs. That followed an even bigger expansion in 2020, when it grew over 38% and added half a million employees.
Overall, Amazon reported 1.6 million employees as of the end of December 2021, of which about 300,000 have corporate jobs.
An Amazon executive said that its Covid-era expansion was one reason for cutbacks on Wednesday in a memo to employees.
“During Covid, our first priority was scaling to meet the needs of our customers while ensuring the safety of our employees. I’m incredibly proud of this team’s work during this period,” Amazon retail chief Doug Harrington said in a memo obtained by CNBC. “Although other companies might have balked at the short-term economics, we prioritized investing for customers and employees during these unprecedented times.”
Meta (formerly Facebook) has increased headcount by thousands of employees each year since going public in 2012, according to SEC filings.
In 2020, Meta added over 13,000 employees, a 30% increase, and the biggest year of hiring in the company’s history. In 2021, it added another 13,000 workers. By total worker numbers, it was the two biggest years of expansion in Facebook’s short history.
Alphabet, formerly Google, has not cut as many positions as other large-cap companies, but in recent weeks, it has cut 240 positions at Verily, its health sciences division, and laid off 40 at Intrinsic, a robotics division.
But while Alphabet’s recent cuts are much smaller than some other companies, its growth was similarly massive.
In 202, Alphabet added over 21,000 employees, or a 15% increase during the year to a total of 156,500 workers. In 2020, it added over 16,000 employees, or a nearly 14% increase.
That growth predates the pandemic, however, as Alphabet has increased headcount at least 10% every year since 2013, and added 20% new employees in 2018 and 2019 as well.
Apple grew much more slowly during the pandemic. In fact, Apple’s hiring over the past few years has followed the same general trend since 2016.
As of September 2022, Apple had 164,000 employees, which includes both corporate employees as well as retail staff for its stores. But that was only a rise of 6.5% from the same period in 2021, amounting to real growth of 10,000 employees. Apple also hired judiciously in 2020, adding less than 7,000 employees in the year before September 2021.
Mario poses at the “SUPER NINTENDO WORLD” welcome celebration at Universal Studios Hollywood on February 16, 2023 in Universal City, California.
Rodin Eckenroth | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Nintendo on Tuesday cut forecast for Switch sales for its fiscal year ending March 2025 as demand wanes for its ageing console.
The Japanese gaming giant said it now expects to sell 12.5 million units of the Switch over the course of the period. That’s down from a previous forecast of 13.5 million units.
Nintendo has been contending with fading demand for its flagship Switch console, which is now more than seven years old.
Investors are waiting for news surrounding a successor to the Switch, which they hope will re-energize Nintendo’s gaming business. In the past, the company said that the Switch successor will be announced in its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2025.
Nintendo also cut full fiscal year forecasts for sales and operating profit. The company said it now expects sales of 1.28 trillion yen versus a previous forecast of 1.35 trillion yen. The operating profit outlook for the period was slashed from 400 billion yen to 360 billion yen.
Here’s how Nintendo did in its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30 versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 276.7 billion Japanese yen ($1.8 billion), compared with 273.34 billion yen expected.
Net profit: 27.7 billion yen, versus 48.06 billion yen expected.
Revenue fell 17% year-on-year. Net profit plunged just over 69% versus the same period last year.
Super Mario, Zelda boost fading
The Switch is Nintendo’s second best-selling console in history, behind the Nintendo DS. Despite the recent fall in sales, Nintendo has prolonged the console’s appeal for an extended period of time since its launch in 2017 by relying on its recognizable characters.
In its last fiscal year, Nintendo managed to reinvigorate sales of the Switch thanks to the the success of the “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and the highly anticipated release of the “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” game, which underscored the appeal of its iconic characters.
But that effect is fading.
On Tuesday, Nintendo noted the boost that the company received in the first half of its last fiscal year, but said “there were no such special factors in the first half of this fiscal year, and with Nintendo Switch now in its eighth year since launch, unit sales of both hardware and software decreased significantly year-on-year.”
Sales of the Switch totaled 4.72 units in the six months ended Sept. 30, compared with 6.84 million units in the same period of last year.
In the face of falling sales, Nintendo has tried to license out its intellectual property for use everywhere, from movies to theme parks. A new Super Mario movie is slated for release in 2026.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.
The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.
Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.
The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.
Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.
Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”
Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.
Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.
Reuters
Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.
Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.
Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.
The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.
Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.