Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for ‘multi-year’ savings
Ruth Porat, Alphabet CFO
Adam Galica | CNBC
Google’s finance chief Ruth Porat recently said in a rare companywide email that the company is making cuts to employee services.
“These are big, multi-year efforts,” Porat said in a Friday email titled: “Our company-wide OKR on durable savings.” Elements of the email were previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.
In separate documents viewed by CNBC, Google said it’s cutting back on fitness classes, staplers, tape and the frequency of laptop replacements for employees.
One of the company’s important objectives for 2023 is to “deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency.” Porat said in the email. “All PAs and Functions are working toward this,” she said, referring to product areas. OKR stands for objectives and key results.
The latest cost-cutting measures come as Alphabet-owned Google continues its most severe era of cost cuts in its almost two decades as a public company. The company said in January that it was eliminating 12,000 jobs, representing about 6% of its workforce, to reckon with slowing sales growth following record head count growth.
Cuts have shown up in other ways. The company declined to pay the remainder of laid-off employees’ maternity and medical leaves, CNBC previously reported.
In her recent email, Porat said the layoffs were “the hardest decisions we’ve had to make as a company.”
“This work is particularly vital because of our recent growth, the challenging economic environment, and our incredible investment opportunities to drive technology forward — particularly in AI,” Porat’s email said.
Porat referred to the year 2008 twice in her email.
“We’ve been here before,” the email stated. “Back in 2008, our expenses were growing faster than our revenue. We improved machine utilization, narrowed our real estate investments, tightened our belt on T&E budgets, cafes, micro kitchens and mobile phone usage, and removed the hybrid vehicle subsidiary.”
“Just as we did in 2008, we’ll be looking at data to identify other areas of spending that aren’t as effective as they should be, or that don’t scale at our size.”
In a statement to CNBC, a spokesperson said, “As we’ve publicly stated, we have a company goal to make durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency. As part of this, we’re making some practical changes to help us remain responsible stewards of our resources while continuing to offer industry-leading perks, benefits and amenities.”
Cutting down on desktop PCs and staplers
Among the equipment changes, Google is pausing refreshes for laptops, desktop PCs and monitors. It’s also “changing how often equipment is replaced,” according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.
Google employees who are not in engineering roles but require a new laptop will receive a Chromebook by default. Chromebooks are laptops made by Google and use a Google-based operating system called Chrome OS.
It’s a shift from the range of offerings, such as Apple MacBooks, that were previously available to employees. “It also provides the best opportunity across all of our managed devices to prevent external compromise,” one document about the laptop changes said.
An employee can no longer expense mobile phones if one is available internally, the document also stated. And employees will need director “or above” approval if they need an accessory that costs more than $1,000 and isn’t available internally.
Under a section titled “Desktops and Workstations,” the company said CloudTop, the company’s internal virtual workstation, will be “the default desktop” for Googlers.
In February, CNBC reported the company asked its cloud employees and partners to share desks by alternating days and are expected to transition to relying on CloudTop for their workstations.
Google employees have also noticed some more extreme cutbacks to office supplies in recent weeks. Staplers and tape are no longer being provided to print stations companywide as “part of a cost effectiveness initiative,” according to a separate, internal facilities directive viewed by CNBC.
“We have been asked to pull all tape/dispensers throughout the building,” a San Francisco facility directive stated. “If you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow.”
A Google spokesperson said staplers and tape continue to be offered companywide but did not provide details.
‘We’ve baked too many muffins on a Monday’
Google’s also cutting some availability of employee services.
“We set a high bar for industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities, and we will continue that into the future,” Porat’s email stated. “However, some programs need to evolve for how Google works today.”
“These are mostly minor adjustments,” stated a separate internal document from the company’s real estate and workplace team. The document said food, fitness, massage and transportation programs were designed for when Googlers were coming in five days a week.
“Now that most of us are in 3 days a week, we’ve noticed our supply/demand ratios are a bit out of sync: We’ve baked too many muffins on a Monday, seen GBuses run with just one passenger, and offered yoga classes on a Friday afternoon when folks are more likely to be working from home,” the document stated.
As a result, Google may close cafes on Mondays and Fridays and shut down some facilities that are “underutilized” due to hybrid schedules, the document states.
As a part of the January U.S. layoffs, the company let go of more than two dozen on-site massage therapists.
Anthony Denier, CEO fo Webull, speaks during an interview on CNBC on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., June 1, 2022.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Shares of Webull soared nearly 375% on Monday, the second day on the market for the stock-trading app, which completed its merger last week with SK Growth Opportunities Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
The rally gives Webull a market cap of almost $30 billion.
Webull competes with Robinhood, Charles Schwab and E-Trade. The app lets investors buy and sell shares and options in individual securities, exchange-traded funds and cryptocurrencies, and offers charts, watchlists, screening tools and paper trading.
The company says it has over 23 million registered users and operates in 15 regions globally. In addition to charging fees on trades, Webull has a premium tier with real-time data that costs $40 per year.
In an investor presentation last month, the company said it was expecting $390.2 million in 2024 revenue, which would be roughly flat from 2023.
Former Alibaba and Xiaomi manager Wang Anquan founded Webull in 2016, and he remains the company’s global CEO. Investors include Coatue, General Atlantic and Lightspeed. The app gained popularity during the Covid pandemic, as U.S. citizens used stimulus checks to invest, Anthony Denier, the company’s group president and U.S. CEO, told CNBC in 2021. Webull users are “much more intellectual” than Robinhood’s, Denier has said.
In November, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter to Denier inquiring about the company’s ties to China. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rise of blank-check companies such as SK Growth Opportunities peaked in 2021, with 613 IPOs completed, according to SPAC Insider. The market fell apart the following year as soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. So far this year there have been 23 SPAC IPOs.
Webull said last year that it was planning for its market debut to take place in the second half of 2024.
WATCH: House Committee slams Webull over alleged ties to Chinese Communist Party
Apple CEO Tim Cook greets former President Barack Obama at the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson | Getty Images
Apple shares rose more than 2% on Monday, pushing the company’s market cap back above $3 trillion, as Wall Street expressed some level of relief that the iPhone maker will be able to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
Late Friday, the Trump administration announced that phones, computers and chips were exempted from new tariffs. Apple is among the most exposed companies to Trump’s tariffs because the majority of its iPhones, iPads and MacBooks are manufactured in China and other Asian countries. Trump has called for Apple to make its products in the U.S.
Most of Apple’s critical imports were exempted from the tariffs, a move that Wall Street analysts said could save Apple billions in costs. However, administration officials warned over the weekend that the exemptions were temporary and could change over the coming weeks.
“I speak to Tim Cook. I helped Tim Cook, recently, and that whole business,” Trump said Monday in a briefing with reporters in the Oval Office, referring to Apple’s CEO. “I don’t want to hurt anybody, but the end result is we’re going to get to the position of greatness for our country.”
Uncertainty about what the future holds helps explain Apple’s relatively muted gain on Friday. The stock is still down almost 9% in April after falling more than 8% in March. The 11% drop in the first quarter marked Apple’s worst performance since 2023.
Apple is the most valuable publicly traded U.S. company once again, edging out Microsoft.
Apple fell below the $3 trillion mark on April 4, two days after Trump announced “reciprocal tariffs” that would place significant duties on China and countries where the company does manufacturing.
The stock rallied last week after Trump announced his administration was dropping new tariff rates to 10% on imports from countries other than China, which would face tariffs as high as 145%.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley wrote in a note Monday that the latest news from the White House brings Apple’s “annualized tariff cost burden” to $7 billion, down from $44 billion as of Thursday.
Technology
Meta resorted to ‘buy-or-bury scheme’ with Instagram and WhatsApp deals, former FTC Chair Lina Khan says
Former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Monday that Facebook “panicked” when making the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as smartphone use took off.
“It saw companies like Instagram and WhatsApp experiencing astronomical growth, and that’s the point at which it resorted to this buy-or-bury scheme where, if it couldn’t outcompete a rival, it either bought them out or cut them off its network,” Khan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, begins a trial with the FTC on Monday. The government alleges that the company monopolized the personal social networking market with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.
Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The trial could result in the social media giant divesting the two companies. Meta has filed a pretrial brief detailing its disagreement with the FTC and reiterating that it believes the company does not have a monopoly.
“There’s no expiration date when it comes to the illegality of the transaction,” Khan said. “I think there is a way in which the entire social networking ecosystem looks different today because Facebook was permitted to go out and make these acquisitions.”
The case is, at its core, about “free and fair trade,” Khan added. Though no settlement has been reached, she said there’s always a possibility of a settlement before the case concludes.
With President Donald Trump regularly holding court with tech executives, Khan said she’s “glad” that Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s efforts to dismiss the case have been, thus far, unsuccessful.
Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, co-hosted an inaugural ball and has reportedly met with the president multiple times since January.
“Until the trial is over and until we actually get a liability verdict and then a remedy, we’re all going to have to wait and see,” Khan said.
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