- The layoffs could begin this week and affect thousands of employees.
- The savings are in addition to previously announced plans to lay off 13% of Meta workers.
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pitching 2023 as the “Year of Efficiency.”
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta is planning another round of layoffs that could affect thousands of workers, according to a Bloomberg News report published Monday evening.
The job cuts could start this week and represent an additional round of layoffs, adding to the 13% of Meta workers laid off as part of a larger cost-cutting plan announced in November.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment to CNBC about the report.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously indicated that the social networking giant would focus this year on efforts to lower the company’s costs, pitching 2023 as the “Year of Efficiency.” He told analysts in February that Meta is focused on “cutting projects that are not performing or may no longer be essential” and that it plans to “remove layers of middle management to make decisions faster.”
The cost savings come at a challenging time for the consumer technology company, which said its costs and expenses rose 22% year-over-year to $25.8 billion in the fourth quarter, while total sales fell 4% to $32 billion.
Meta’s core online advertising business continues to face obstacles due to factors including a tough digital advertising market, the lingering effects of Apple’s 2021 iOS privacy update and increased competition from ByteDance-owned TikTok.
Meanwhile, the company continues to invest heavily in developing the metaverse, which Meta believes could represent the next frontier for mainstream computing. The company’s Reality Labs division, which is tasked with building the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies necessary for the metaverse, brought in $727 million in revenue during the fourth quarter, but also posted an operating loss of $4.28 billion .
Zuckerberg has said he would “take responsibility” for the company’s previously announced cost-cutting plans, and said he sees layoffs “as a last resort.”
“We are restructuring teams to increase our efficiency,” Zuckerberg said last fall when Meta announced layoffs. “However, these measures alone will not bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I have also made the difficult decision to let people go.”
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