Snap plans to lay off 20% of specialists: the company's chief business officer leaves his post (UPD)
Snap will lay off 20% of its staff of specialists in more than 6,400 people. The cuts will affect different departments and will not be uniform. In addition, it is already known that the Chief Business Officer of Snap is moving to Netflix, writes The Verge.
Snap layoffs will begin this week and hit some departments harder than others.
For example, a team working to get developers to create mini-apps and games inside Snapchat will suffer greatly. The Zenly app, which Snap acquired in 2017, will also undergo major layoffs. A number of specialists will also be fired from the Snap division, which is responsible for AR Spectacles and the Pixy unmanned drone, which lasted only a few months on sale.
Snap has two development offices in Ukraine: in Kiev and Odessa. It is not yet known whether the cuts will affect Ukrainian teams. DOU has contacted the company with a corresponding request, but there is no response yet.
The scale of layoffs is significant, but they are not surprising: Snap shares fell by almost 80%. In May, the company said it would slow down hiring and look for ways to cut costs. Snap then showed "terrible earnings" for the second quarter and said it would not forecast results for the third, the publication writes.
Like other tech companies, Snap actively hired employees during the pandemic. In March 2020, about 3,500 full — time employees worked there, and in the last quarter-already 6,446, which is 38% more than in the same period last year. In May 2021, the company made its largest purchase in history, acquiring WaveOptics, a supplier of AR displays used in the latest Spectacles glasses, for more than.500 million.
Snap's central office declined to comment on the layoffs.
Updated on 31.08.2022 at 17:35
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel posted an appeal to his team on August 31.
The CEO said that the annual profit growth is lower than what the company expected this year. Forecasts showed that this trend will continue in 2023. Accordingly, Snap had to adapt to such realities.
"We have decided to stop investing in Snap Originals, Minis, Games and Pixy. We also started the process of closing the Zenly and Voisey apps. As a result, we made a difficult decision to reduce the size of the team by about 20%. The scale of this reduction should significantly reduce the risk that it will ever have to be done again. At the same time, it will balance our desire to invest in the long — term future and accelerate profit growth," the CEO wrote.
In the US, the company will provide at least four months of compensation to dismissed specialists. Outside of the States, Snap will adapt compensation and benefits in accordance with local regulations and will try to "provide the same level of support regardless of geography." In addition, they promise to help outgoing specialists find new career opportunities.
