After Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, it was the turn of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to announce a massive layoff plan, cutting about 12,000 jobs worldwide, or just over 6% of its total workforce, according to the data. for AFP.

“Over the past two years, we have experienced periods of impressive growth,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to group employees.

“To support and facilitate that growth, we’ve hired in a different economic environment than we have today,” he added, noting that the economy has forced the company to reduce its workforce.

As of the end of September 2022, Alphabet had nearly 187,000 employees worldwide.

The job cuts will be made “across all departments, functions, levels of responsibility and regions,” Pichai said, without elaborating.

The executive also highlighted Google’s priority in artificial intelligence, which many experts believe will be the next big battleground for the tech giants.

The stunning success of ChatGPT from OpenAI, a startup funded by Microsoft, could put Google’s famous search engine in the shade.

Several US media reported that the IT company is considering integrating ChatGPT into its own Bing search engine.

Wall Street is reacting positively

US employees affected by Alphabet’s layoff plan have already been notified.

In other countries, the process will take longer, depending on local labor laws.

In the United States, the laid-off workers will receive at least 16 weeks of pay, a bonus for 2022, vacation and six months of health insurance.

Foreign workers in the US will also be able to get legal help if they want to stay in the US.

Wall Street welcomed the layoff announcement, with Alphabet shares up 4.4 percent by 1535 GMT.

“While Google has emphasized the need to improve efficiency across its diverse operations, we believe investors wanted to see more by cutting costs,” CFRA’s Angelo Zino analyzed.

Unsustainable pace / 194,000 workers lost their jobs

US IT giant Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it will lay off about 10,000 employees by the end of March, citing economic uncertainty among other reasons.

Furniture retailer Wayfair announced Friday that it is cutting about 1,750 jobs, or 10 percent of its workforce, to offset a slowdown in business.

And in recent weeks and months, Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Amazon, Twitter and Salesforce have also decided to lay off several thousand employees.

The tech sector is going through tough times amid high inflation and rising interest rates after the boom period, especially in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown.

Naveen Sarma of S&P Global Ratings said technology firms need to recognize “that they are not going to grow as fast or invest in new products and services as much as they thought.”

In this context, advertising agencies are reluctant to spend on advertising, which constitutes a significant part of the turnover of companies such as Google, Facebook or Twitter.

According to the specialized site Layoffs.fyi, since the beginning of 2022 in the United States, almost 194 thousand employees of this sector have lost their jobs, not counting Alphabet’s announcement on Friday.

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