Software maker whose tools for sales and customer service have made it one of the highest-profile cloud computing companies has more than 79,000 employees, with layoffs potentially affecting nearly 8,000 . In addition to Benioff’s email, the company revealed its layoff plans in a regulatory filing.
Salesforce, which owns the popular workplace chat tool Slack and counts Ford, GE Appliances, and Humana among its customers, is the latest addition to the list of tech giants to lay off workers as the pandemic unfolds. The sales boom is waning and the possibility of a recession is looming.
Facebook’s parent company Meta announced it was laying off 11,000 people last fall, while Amazon is cutting about 10,000 jobs. Other big tech companies have implemented hiring freezes. This is all a dramatic shift from the explosive growth of Silicon Valley over the past decade.
Salesforce also said it would shrink its office space as part of a cost-cutting plan that included “choosing to exit real estate.” The company’s headquarters are located in the tallest building in San Francisco called the Salesforce Tower. It was not made clear whether the tower would be affected by the reduction plan, and representatives declined to provide further details beyond what was mentioned in the filing and Benioff’s emails.
Salesforce, like many of its fellow tech giants, has dealt with slowing sales growth. Another co-CEO, Brett Taylor, said: recently announced He will leave the company at the end of this month. He served as chairman of Twitter for most of the year, until Elon Musk bought the company and dissolved the board.
Salesforce’s revenue growth slowed to 14% last quarter. The company’s stock fell nearly 50% last year as tech stocks had a dismal year amid slowing growth and economic uncertainty.
Shares rose more than 2% as Wednesday’s cost-cutting plan was well received by shareholders.
“Benioff is a smart poker move to sustain profits in uncertain times, and the company has clearly overbuilt its organization along with the rest of the tech sector over the last few years,” said Dan, an analyst at Wedbush Securities. , and now a slowdown is imminent.” Ives and John Katsingris wrote a note on Wednesday morning.
Salesforce said some of the laid-off employees will receive an email Wednesday morning and will be contacted by company management. When it comes to receiving welfare benefits, Benioff wrote in an email.
Despite the big tech slowdown and global economic uncertainty, job openings in the US are fairly stable. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that he had “little changed” at 10.5 million job openings at the end of November.
But newly laid-off employees can face stiff competition from other tech professionals for the top positions.
Twitter cut about half its workforce when Musk took over the company. In addition to cuts by Meta, Amazon, Lyft, Netflix, Shopify, and many others, tens of thousands of tech workers have continued to look for work over the past year.
