14 March 2023
If you are covering the latest announcement by Meta regarding job cuts, please find below a comment from Ben Barringer, equity research analyst at Quilter Cheviot:
“Meta is truly embracing its ‘year of efficiency’ with yet more job cuts as it looks to refocus its efforts on its core services. The level of job cuts announced is not surprising, and it shows quite how speculative some areas of the business were being with the NFT division being closed after a short amount of time in operation. It is also leaving the door open for more redundancies, highlighting that it may not quite yet be in the shape than management want it to be in, particularly in this economic environment which is clearly proving challenging for other sectors. Indeed, Meta somewhat over hired in the pandemic and there is a lot of unwinding to do in this regard, so we expect further announcements to come on this.
“Ultimately, businesses like Meta and the other tech giants are cash generative so it is good they are focusing once again on growing the services that made them the companies they are today and focussing on profitability. Innovation is necessary but Meta’s experience has shown that it cannot come at the loss of the current business. Meta itself is already a big investor in artificial intelligence and it will be using these systems to look at where workforce efficiencies can be found. AI is also being used to solve targeting advertising problems for its customers. Pointing the company in that direction is the right thing to be doing, for customers and investors."
