Topic: Layoffs
Snap Cuts Jobs, Changes Management for Hardware Unit (Sep 21, 2017)
Snap Inc has apparently cut about a dozen jobs and shuffled management in its hardware unit in recent weeks, according to Bloomberg. The only hardware this group has shipped so far are the Spectacles camera-glasses launched late last year, which had sold less than 150,000 units as of the end of June by my estimates, and accounted for less than 5% of revenue during that time. Hardware may still end up being an important future revenue stream for the company, but that future certainly isn’t here yet, even though there have been reports about drones and other hardware in the works. Eliminating marketing people from the group suggests either that Snap was unhappy with their work or that it won’t have new hardware to market anytime soon (or both), which reinforces the sense that a meaningful hardware revenue stream is still way off. To put the job cuts in context, though, 12 people represent a tiny fraction of Snap’s overall employee base, which sat at 2600 at the end of June and has likely risen significantly since then (it was under 2000 at the beginning of the year). I argued at the time of the launch that the vending-machine-based scarcity marketing for Spectacles was a very clever way to get far more attention than raw demand itself would warrant, but it never led to much more actual demand.
via Bloomberg
Disney/ABC TV to Cut Staff to Reduce Costs (Aug 31, 2017)
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Microsoft to Lay Off Thousands as Part of Reorganization (Jul 6, 2017)
Microsoft has now confirmed the layoffs which have been rumored for the last week or so, and which are the second part of the announcement made earlier this week regarding the restructuring of the company’s sales organization. CNBC says 3,000 jobs will go, while Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, who I’m more inclined to trust with this stuff, says only that there will be “several thousand” cuts, with some of those losing jobs found roles elsewhere in the company. This is a relatively small round of layoffs for Microsoft given recent history, as the company’s core workforce excluding LinkedIn has fallen from a peak of around 128,000 in 2014 to just over 110,000 at the end of March already. The layoffs are likely to impact the sales team reorganized earlier this week, reflecting an ongoing shift away from legacy products towards cloud services. Over the last few years, Microsoft has been beefing up its support and consulting staff while reducing its engineering numbers considerably and keeping its overall sales and marketing staff roughly constant at around 50,000. Interestingly, Microsoft’s US/international employee split is now back at nearly 60/40, roughly where it was before the Nokia devices acquisition pushed it to about 48/52. The vast majority of the employees taken on during that period have now either been eliminated or moved to other roles in the company, though Microsoft currently has around 10,000 more core employees (and around 20,000 more including LinkedIn) than it did in mid-2013. Therefore, although this stinks for those being laid off, it’s not an enormous reorg by Microsoft standards, and mostly reflects subtler shifts in the emphasis of the sales and marketing teams and other effects from Microsoft’s ongoing move from legacy to cloud services, in what’s now become almost an annual ritual at the company.
via ZDNet
SoundCloud Cuts 40% of Staff, Closes San Francisco and London Offices (Jul 6, 2017)
SoundCloud is significantly reducing its staff and closing two of its offices in a bid to cut costs and reduce losses as one potential acquisition after another seems to fizzle. Twitter and Spotify were each reported as suitors earlier, but both ultimately moved on, and just in the last few days French music streaming service Deezer was also mulling an acquisition. I’m guessing these cuts are a sign that that deal also fell through and SoundCloud now realizes its only hope for survival is going it alone. That continues to be a really tough proposition, because SoundCloud continues to struggle to find a role for itself as a paid rather than free service. It’s become enormously popular as a free music source, but almost all the artists who start their careers on SoundCloud eventually cross over to the mainstream music industry and its more established business models, including paid streaming, which is becoming increasingly important and is driving almost all the revenue growth in the industry. SoundCloud’s failure to cross over with those artists to the paid streaming world is likely to be fatal unless salvation comes in the form of an acquisition.
via Bloomberg
Microsoft Reorganizes Business Sales Teams Ahead of Anticipated Layoffs (Jul 3, 2017)
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★ LeEco Cuts 70% of US Staff, Refocuses on Chinese-Speaking Americans (May 23, 2017)
I’ve been both intrigued by and enormously skeptical of LeEco’s US market entry from the beginning, as this piece I wrote after its US launch back in October suggests. The company had been successful in China on the basis of a slow evolution from a content to a hardware company, and yet its US launch seemed to have turned that strategy almost entirely on its head without the compelling content that helped it succeed domestically. It also made many of the same mistakes as other Chinese companies attempting to expand into the US by not making enough changes to its playbook when it moved to the US. There have been reports for a few days now about an impending massive cut to the US business, and today has brought official confirmation. There’s no schadenfreude here from me given the large number of people losing their jobs, but hopefully LeEco’s story serves as a cautionary tale for other Chinese companies entering the US market. As the essay and video in the related narrative suggest, this has always been a tough task, and no Chinese company has really succeeded in building a big, successful ecosystem in the US. Even those that have done well more narrowly, such as in low-cost hardware, have taken years to get there and even then aren’t considered in the same class as leaders like Apple, Samsung, LG, or even Sony. Ironically, LeEco’s retrenchment now to serving Chinese-speaking residents of the US would have made a ton of sense as a market entry strategy last year, starting much smaller and more modestly, and slowly expanding out from that core into the broader US market. Instead, that new focus is the result of a somewhat humiliating defeat, caused in equal measures by an overly hubristic and poorly thought out market entry and financial constraints at headquarters that gave that strategy very little time to play out. This could – and should – have gone very differently.
via CNET
ESPN Lays Off 100 On-Air Personalities (Apr 26, 2017)
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GoPro Announces Layoffs and Cost Cuts But Reiterates Revenue Guidance for Q1 (Mar 15, 2017)
GoPro today both reiterated its revenue guidance for Q1 and announced fairly significant cost cuts including layoffs in an attempt to get back to profitability after five straight quarters of net losses. It will eliminate 270 current and planned positions, which equate to roughly 17% of its headcount at the end of Q4, and says full year operating expenses will be $582 million, which compares to $835 million in 2016 and $618 million in 2015, so a fairly significant cut. The fact that it still expects to hit the same revenue numbers makes me wonder what those people were doing that they can be so easily dismissed without impacting revenue growth. Operating expenses are weighted towards R&D and sales and marketing costs, so the cuts will likely hit hardest in those two areas, one of which would likely impact longer term sales while the other would be likelier to hit short term sales. So color me skeptical that GoPro can make these cuts and still hit its revenue numbers for the year, although investors clearly feel differently (the stock is up over 8% after hours).
via GoPro
Fitbit Announces Preliminary Fourth Quarter 2016 Results (Jan 30, 2017)
These are preliminary results from Fitbit, designed to flag to investors that revenues in Q4 were well down on previous forecasts, and to announce layoffs and other cuts to the business designed to realign costs with lower revenues. The company will lay off 6% of its workforce as part of an attempt to cut $200m (or almost a fifth) out of its operating cost run rate for the year. Bizarrely, it’s still characterizing its current troubles as temporary, even though it’s given very little evidence to back up this claim. Importantly, revenue in the first half of 2017 is likely to be down compared to H1 2016, because it had big new product launches a year ago. So even if we’re to believe the claims of a rebound, Fitbit concedes there won’t be any evidence of it until later this year. Fitbit continues to be by far the most successful standalone wearables company out there, but if even it is struggling in this way at this point, that’s indicative of broader challenges for the wearables industry.
via Fitbit
Verizon Lays Off Go90 Employees, Tasks Vessel Team With App Rebuild – Variety (Jan 23, 2017)
Verizon’s Go90 has never seemed like the right answer to the question of what a mobile carrier should do to make money from video (the right answer might either be launching a fully fledged video service a la DirecTV Now, or simply enabling all other video services a la BingeOn). These layoffs seem like validation of that sentiment, as it looks like Verizon is doing a bit of a reset on its Go90 efforts, putting former Vessel people in charge instead of the 155-strong team it’s had in San Jose for some time now, most of whom came from the Intel OnCue acquisition. Go90 has always been an odd mishmash of stuff, mostly freely available elsewhere with a few freemium elements focused on millennial-oriented content, but has never felt like a serious video play, and I still don’t expect it to turn into any kind of meaningful business for Verizon unless there’s a big pivot to a new strategy for the service.
via Verizon Lays Off Go90 Employees, Tasks Vessel Team With App Rebuild | Variety
Parrot is laying off a third of its drone division – Recode (Jan 9, 2017)
I’ve tagged this one against the Hardware is Hard narrative, because it seems the perfect illustration – thin margins in the face of aggressively priced competition from China is the perfect encapsulation of much of what ails the hardware industry. On the other hand, it’s also notable that Parrot is heading deeper into the enterprise drone market and pulling back from the consumer side – that seems an entirely sensible move in the face of the competition, and should work out better for the company. DJI, though, seems increasingly dominant here, while I’m curious about how GoPro will fare – it faces the same issues as Parrot across its entire business, and may well see similar results in drones specifically.
via Parrot is laying off a third of its drone division – Recode