“I’m confident that Microsoft will emerge from this stronger and more competitive,” CEO Satya Nadella announced in a memo to employees that was posted on the company website Wednesday. Some employees will find out this week if they’re losing their jobs, he wrote.
Amazon: 18,000 jobs cut
Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company was planning to lay off more than 18,000 employees, primarily in its human resources and stores divisions. It came after Amazon said in November it was looking to cut staff, including in its devices and recruiting organizations. CNBC reported at the time that the company was looking to lay off about 10,000 employees.
Amazon went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company’s global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Alphabet (Verily): 230 jobs cut
Google parent company Alphabet had largely avoided layoffs until January, when it cut 15% of employees from Verily, its health sciences division. Google itself has not undertaken any significant layoffs as of Jan. 18, but employees are increasingly growing worried that the ax may soon fall.
Crypto.com: 500 jobs cut
Crypto.com announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce Jan. 13. The company had 2,450 employees, according to PitchBook data, suggesting around 490 employees were laid off.
CEO Kris Marszalek said in a blog post that the crypto exchange grew “ambitiously” but was unable to weather the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire FTX without the further cuts.
“All impacted personnel have already been notified,” Marszalek said in a post.
The exchange plans to cut 950jobs, according to a blog post. Coinbase, which had roughly 4,700 employees as of the end of September, had already slashed 18% of its workforce in June saying it needed to manage costs after growing “too quickly” during the bull market.
“With perfect hindsight, looking back, we should have done more,” CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC in a phone interview at the time. “The best you can do is react quickly once information becomes available, and that’s what we’re doing in this case.”
In a letter to employees, co-CEO Marc Benioff said customers have been more “measured” in their purchasing decisions given the challenging macroeconomic environment, which led Salesforce to make the “very difficult decision” to lay off workers.
Salesforce said it will record charges of $1 billion to $1.4 billion related to the headcount reductions, and $450 million to $650 million related to the office space reductions.
Meta‘s disappointing guidance for the fourth quarter of 2022 wiped out one-fourth of the company’s market cap and pushed the stock to its lowest level since 2016.
The tech giant’s cuts come after it expanded headcount by about 60% during the pandemic. The business has been hurt by competition from rivals such as TikTok, a broad slowdown in online ad spending and challenges from Apple’s iOS changes.
Twitter: 3,700 jobs cut
Lyft: 700 jobs cut
Lyftannounced in November that it cut 13% of its staff, or about 700 jobs. In a letter to employees, CEO Logan Green and President John Zimmer pointed to “a probable recession sometime in the next year” and rising ride-share insurance costs.
For laid-off workers, the ride-hailing company promised 10 weeks of pay, health care coverage through the end of April, accelerated equity vesting for the Nov. 20 vesting date and recruiting assistance. Workers who had been at the company for more than four years will get an extra four weeks of pay, they added.
CEO Patrick Collison wrote in a memo to staff that the cuts were necessary amid rising inflation, fears of a looming recession, higher interest rates, energy shocks, tighter investment budgets and sparser startup funding. Taken together, these factors signal “that 2022 represents the beginning of a different economic climate,” he said.
Stripe was valued at $95 billion last year, and reportedly lowered its internal valuation to $74 billion in July.
In a memo to staff, CEO Tobi Lutke acknowledged he had misjudged how long the pandemic-driven e-commerce boom would last, and said the company is being hit by a broader pullback in online spending. Its stock price is down 78% in 2022.
Netflix: 450 jobs cut
Netflix announced two rounds of layoffs. In May, the streaming service eliminated 150 jobs after the company reported its first subscriber loss in a decade. In late June, it announced another 300 layoffs.
In a statement to employees, Netflix said, “While we continue to invest significantly in the business, we made these adjustments so that our costs are growing in line with our slower revenue growth.”
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told employees in a memo that the company needs to restructure its business to deal with its financial challenges. He said the company’s quarterly year-over-year revenue growth rate of 8% “is well below what we were expecting earlier this year.”
Robinhood: 1,100 jobs cut
Retail brokerage firm Robinhood slashed 23% of its staff in August, after cutting 9% of its workforce in April. Based on public filings and reports, that amounts to more than 1,100 employees.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev blamed “deterioration of the macro environment, with inflation at 40-year highs accompanied by a broad crypto market crash.”
“Tesla will be reducing salaried headcount by 10% as we have become overstaffed in many areas,” Musk wrote. “Note this does not apply to anyone actually building cars, battery packs or installing solar. Hourly headcount will increase.”
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.