Google said Friday it will lay off 12,000 people from its workforce, adding to the slew of major U.S. tech companies cutting jobs amid fears of an oncoming recession.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said in an email sent to the company’s staff Friday that the firm will begin making layoffs in the U.S. immediately. In other countries, the process “will take longer due to local laws and practices,” he said.
related investing news
41 minutes ago
The web search and video sharing giant will offer U.S.-based employees 16 weeks of severance pay plus two weeks for each additional year they’ve worked at Google, Pichai added.
Tech companies are facing a variety of challenges at the moment, not least rising interest rates and inflation over the past year that have clobbered technology shares and forced advertisers to cut back on online ad spending.
Hikes to interest rates from the U.S. Federal Reserve in particular have led to souring appetite for American tech shares. The gloomy macroeconomic climate has in turn piled pressure on those companies to make deep cuts to their workforces.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 09: Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks at a panel at the CEO Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 09, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. The CEO Summit entered its second day of events with a formal signing for the “International Coalition to Connect Marine Protected Areas” and a speech from U.S. President Joe Biden. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Twitter, under the leadership of Elon Musk, has also made redundancies, slashing over half of the company’s headcount since taking over as CEO in October.
The layoff move from Google on Friday comes after CNBC reported Wednesday that the firm was deferring a portion of employees’ year-end bonus checks until March or April instead of paying them in full in January.
Read the full memo Pichai sent out to staff on Friday:
Googlers,
I have some difficult news to share. We’ve decided to reduce our workforce by approximately 12,000 roles. We’ve already sent a separate email to employees in the US who are affected. In other countries, this process will take longer due to local laws and practices.
This will mean saying goodbye to some incredibly talented people we worked hard to hire and have loved working with. I’m deeply sorry for that. The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here.
Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.
I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI. To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices. So, we’ve undertaken a rigorous review across product areas and functions to ensure that our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company. The roles we’re eliminating reflect the outcome of that review. They cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions.
To the Googlers who are leaving us: Thank you for working so hard to help people and businesses everywhere. Your contributions have been invaluable and we are grateful for them.
While this transition won’t be easy, we’re going to support employees as they look for their next opportunity.
In the US:
We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days).
We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
We’ll pay 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time.
We’ll be offering 6 months of healthcare, job placement services, and immigration support for those affected.
Outside the US, we’ll support employees in line with local practices.
As an almost 25-year-old company, we’re bound to go through difficult economic cycles. These are important moments to sharpen our focus, reengineer our cost base, and direct our talent and capital to our highest priorities.
Being constrained in some areas allows us to bet big on others. Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry.
Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever. And we’re getting ready to share some entirely new experiences for users, developers and businesses, too. We have a substantial opportunity in front of us with AI across our products and are prepared to approach it boldly and responsibly.
All this work is a continuation of the “healthy disregard for the impossible” that’s been core to our culture from the beginning. When I look around Google today, I see that same spirit and energy driving our efforts. That’s why I remain optimistic about our ability to deliver on our mission, even on our toughest days. Today is certainly one of them.
I’m sure you have many questions about how we’ll move forward. We’ll be organizing a town hall on Monday. Check your calendar for details. Until then, please take good care of yourselves as you absorb this difficult news. As part of that, if you are just starting your work day, please feel free to work from home today.
Alibaba’s global headquarters in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on May 9, 2024.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Alibaba-backed Banma, a provider of technology for smart cars, is planning to list shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, according to a filing.
In a filing dated Aug. 21, Alibaba said it currently owns about 45% of Banma and will continue to control over 30% of the company’s stock after the listing. Banma said in a filing that the announcement does not guarantee a listing will take place.
Banma, founded in 2015 and based in Shanghai, is “principally engaged in the development of smart cockpit solutions,” Alibaba’s filing says. In March, Alibaba announced that it was deepening its partnership with BMW in China, building an artificial intelligence engine for cars with a solution built by Banma, “Alibaba’s intelligent cockpit solution provider.”
In addition to Alibaba, Banma is backed by investors including China’s SAIC Motor, SDIC Investment Management and Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese investment firm started by Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.
Alibaba in the past referred to Banma as a joint venture “between us and SAIC Motor.”
Private renewable energy projects are still moving forward despite a pullback in government support, and new technology is making that construction more efficient.
Solar farms, for example, take meticulous planning and surveying, involve long hours and require significant labor. Now, robots are taking on the job.
CivDot is a four-wheeled robot that can mark up to 3,000 layout points per day and is accurate within 8 millimeters. The machine can ride over rugged terrain and work through rough weather.
It is the brainchild of California-based Civ Robotics.
“Our secret sauce and our core technology is actually in the navigation and the geospatial — being able to literally mark coordinates within less than a quarter inch, which is very, very difficult in an uneven terrain, outdoor surfaces, and out in the desert,” said Tom Yeshurun, CEO of Civ Robotics.
The data for manual surveying is uploaded into the Civ software, then the operator chooses the area they want to mark and presses go. The robot does the rest, saving both time and money.
Read more CNBC tech news
“The manual surveying equipment, if you use that in the field and you have three crews, they will need three land surveying handheld receivers. That alone is already equal to how much we lease our machines in the field, and all the labor savings is just another benefit,” Yeshurun said.
Civ Robotics has more than 100 of these robots in the field that are primarily being used by renewable energy companies, but they are also used in oil and gas. It is currently working with Bechtel Corporation on several solar projects.
“These were usually pretty highly paid field engineers that we would send out there, and they might be able to do 250 or 350 pile marks a day. With the CivDot robot, we’re able to do about 1250 a day,” said Kelley Brown, vice president at Bechtel.
Brown said the company has used the robot in thick and muddy terrain in Texas and out in the deserts of Nevada.
“And so you have to think about things like the tires, or you may have to think about clearance. Are you trying to get over existing brush and such, across the solar field? So that’s one thing that we contemplate. I think the other is, you know, this runs on batteries, so you’ve got to contemplate battery swaps,” she added.
Civ Robotics is backed by Alleycorp, FF Venture Capital, Bobcat Company, Newfund Capital, Trimble Ventures, and Converge. Total VC funding to date is $12.5 million.
There are other robotics solutions for markings, but the competition is mostly doing work on highways and soccer fields. Yeshurun said those rivals can’t handle the terrains that the solar industry faces as it expands into new territories.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
The PlayStation DualSense controller and PlayStation 5 console.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
PlayStation 5 game consoles will cost $50 more in the U.S. starting this week, Sony announced on Wednesday.
The price for an entry-level PlayStation 5 Digital Edition will increase from $450 to $500, and a PlayStation 5 with a disc drive is going up to $550 from $500. Sony’s high-end PlayStation 5 Pro will cost $750, up from $700. The PlayStation 5 was first released in 2020.
President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced in April went into effect earlier this month on most countries. The U.S. currently has a 30% tariff on imports from China, and higher tariffs on goods from the world’s second-largest economy are currently “paused,” according to the administration. Sony’s home country of Japan was hit with a 15% tariff.
While Sony didn’t attribute the increase to Trump’s tariffs, consumer companies have been warning for months that higher prices are on the way.
“Similar to many global businesses, we continue to navigate a challenging economic environment,” Sony said in its blog post.
The company said that retail prices for console accessories such as controllers haven’t changed.
Earlier this month, Sony officials said the company was working on supply chain diversification to combat U.S. tariffs, and said that the console hardware it sells in the U.S. is produced outside of China.
“It is difficult to speak to our hardware pricing strategy as that has implications for our future competitive strategy,” ” Sony officials said, according to a translated transcript of a call with financial analysts posted on its website. “But we intend to take a flexible approach to such decision-making by monitoring consumer price sensitivity as we think about total full-year segment profits, lifetime value, manufacturing, units sold in, and our content sales potential.”
In May, Microsoftraised the price of its Xbox video game consoles. Nintendo delayed pre-orders of its Switch 2 by a few weeks in April, attributing the delay to tariffs. Although Nintendo did not raise the price of its new consoles, it hiked the price of the original Switch earlier this month.