Mass Layoffs Continue in 2023: More Than 30,000 Employees Laid Off In The Indian Tech Sector In The Past 2 Years.

Mass Layoffs Continue in 2023: More Than 30,000 Employees Laid Off In The Indian Tech Sector In The Past 2 Years.

As the new year began, e-commerce giant Amazon and enterprise software company Salesforce revealed they would be laying off a combined total of over 25,000 workforces, with other companies wanting to join the continuing layoff season out of recessionary concern.

Layoffs.fyi, a website that keeps tabs on layoffs reports that 28,096 people were laid off by tech companies around the world between January 1 and January 5. More than 17,000 people worked in technology and were laid off in December of last year (the holiday season may be one of the reasons for lower numbers).

In 2020, the covid-19 pandemic nearly brought the entire world to a standstill. Organizations of all sizes have begun laying off workers and have stopped taking on new employees. It’s estimated that over 30,000 people in India’s technology industry have lost their jobs over the past two years. About 2,600 Ola employees were let go between 2020 and 2022, as reported by Layoffs.fyi, an online platform that has been keeping tabs on tech layoffs since covid-19.

1,400 jobs, or 35% of the employees, were eliminated in May 2020 as part of the ride-hailing platform’s cost-cutting measures. As a recent turn of events shows, the company has let go of 200 people across departments in an effort to reorganize.
Byju’s, an educational technology company, has laid off roughly 2,500 workers in the last two years. Those affected by the layoffs worked in the product, content, media, and technology departments. The company closed its Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram office.

In a first round of layoffs scheduled for May 2020, Swiggy dismissed 1,100 workers. 350 in July’s second layoff. According to Layoffs.fyi, the figure has topped 2,250 in the last two years. WhiteHat JR, another educational technology company, has also been experiencing significant layoffs. There will reportedly be a reduction of 2,100 positions at the company in India between 2020 and 2022. During that time, Unacademy, led by Gaurav Munjal, had to lay off 1,500 workers.

There were rumors that Oyo was going to lay off workers in November of 2019, and the company did, firing people in both India and China in January 2020. According to a report from last month, the company is looking to fill 250 sales positions. While this was happening, it planned to lay off 600 people from various technology departments.

A large number of Amazon’s Indian workers are among the roughly 1,000 people the company has said it will lay off worldwide. It has been reported that the company has begun communicating with its employees in India via email. But Layoffs-Fyi reports that over the past few years, the e-commerce company has let go of around a thousand workers in the country.

Other Indian tech startups that have laid off approximately 1,100, 920, 700, and 650 employees in the last two years include Vedantu, CureFit, MakeMyTrip (in 2020), and Meesho. Zomato eliminated 620 jobs in India, while Uber and Udaan eliminated 600 and 530 jobs, respectively.

This suggests that 2023 has the potential to be the worst year ever in the technology industry. Layoffs.fyi, a website that has been keeping track of layoffs since the pandemic began, reports that in 2022 alone, 153,110 people lost their jobs at companies like Meta, Twitter, Oracle, Nvidia, Snap, Uber, Spotify, Intel, and Salesforce.

In November, a record 51,489 techies lost their jobs, making it the month with the highest layoff total on record.

Google is just one of many large tech firms that have refused to release employees on a date. The search engine giant, however, will likely implement severe measures to reduce its workforce beginning in early 2023. The Information reported that about 6% of Google employees might be let go for “not having enough influence.”

Google cutbacks in 2023 could result in the layoff of up to 11,000 employees. Starting early next year, Google’s management may be able to evict thousands of low-performing workers with the help of a new system for managing performance. It is also possible for managers to use these evaluations as a way to get out of receiving incentives like salary increases or stock grants, as stated in the report.

According to the new system, approximately 11,000 workers, or 6% of the total workforce, will be labeled as low performers based on their contribution to the company. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, has expressed a desire to increase efficiency across the company by 20%, which may result in layoffs.

Pichai stated that Google continues to invest in long-term projects such as quantum computing. In spite of this, “to be smart, to be frugal, to be scrappy, to be more efficient” are all qualities that should not be overlooked. Information about Microsoft’s mass layoff of employees across the company’s many departments began surfacing in October of last year.

The layoffs affected people from all ranks and across all teams and regions.

The technology giant would not confirm the number of layoffs, but reports indicated it was below 1,000. According to an interview with CNBCTV18, Nadella predicts that the next two years will be the most difficult yet.

When asked about the global economic downturn, he was quoted as saying, “There is an actual economic downturn in large portions of the world, and therefore the combined effect of pull forward and downturns imply we will be required to modify.”

Meanwhile, Apple’s market cap dropped below $2 trillion during trading last week, the first time this has happened since early 2021. The drop caused the tech behemoth’s market cap to drop by $1 trillion in a single year.

Apple, like many other tech companies, has had supply chain problems in China due to the Covid turmoil, which disrupted operations at Foxconn’s primary facility in the city of Zhengzhou, located in the country’s central region.

Last week, reports surfaced suggesting that production at Foxconn’s largest iPhone manufacturing facility had reached about 90% of maximum capacity, indicating that the company is making a slow but steady recovery. Still, Apple hasn’t confirmed or hinted at any layoffs as of yet.

As the end of the month approaches, everyone’s attention has turned to the quarterly results from the big tech companies, which will hopefully shed light on which of these businesses will be the first to lay off workers if a recession does indeed materialize.

Edited by Prakriti Arora