Zuckerberg uses red pencil
Hiring freeze at Meta
The Facebook group Meta is facing austerity measures after the weakening of its business. Founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg prepared the employees for a hiring freeze and budget cuts in an internal question and answer session.
Mark Zuckerberg is expected to announce job cuts at Meta.
The Meta Group is planning a savings program of at least ten percent, writes the Wall Street Journal. Meta declined to comment on the report when asked, but referred to statements by Zuckerberg in late July.
At that time, the group had recorded a decline in sales for the first time in its history. In the second quarter of 2022, sales fell 1 percent year-on-year to $28.8 billion. Profits fell 36 percent to $6.7 billion.
Competition from Tiktok
Meta is suffering from the current turmoil in the global economy and competition from video platform Tiktok. Like Tiktok, the group is now increasingly relying on short videos that are recommended to users using a powerful algorithm.
Apple’s measures to better protect privacy on the iPhone also messed up the business model. At the same time, the focus on virtual worlds – the “metaverse” – entails development costs in the billions.
Zuckerbergs Metavers
Zuckerberg sees the future of the Internet in the metaverse, virtual worlds in which users work, play and communicate using avatars. That’s why he renamed Facebook to Meta a year ago.
According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said he had hoped that economic development would have stabilized more in the meantime. But since it doesn’t look like it, Meta wants to plan more carefully. There should be budget cuts across various areas.
Meta had grown rapidly in recent years, including to meet security and hate speech filtering requirements. As of June 30, the Group had 83,553 employees compared to 63,404 a year earlier.
(SDA)