Needham senior analyst Laura Martin discusses Meta’s one-day crash, which ranks it as the worst day in stock market history, and weighs in on the company’s future.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms plans to lay off thousands of employees this week, the first major layoffs in the social media platform’s history, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
The layoffs add to broader layoffs across the tech industry, with Twitter, Snap, Microsoft and others all shedding jobs in recent months.
A spokesman for Meta declined to comment on Sunday, but directed FOX Business to listen to comments made by CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on a third-quarter earnings call last month.
“Through 2023, we will focus our investments on a few high-priority growth areas,” Zuckerberg told investors on Oct. 10. 26. “So that means some teams will grow significantly, but most other teams will be flat or shrink next year.”
Mark Zuckerberg speaks via video at the 2022 SXSW Conference and Music Festival at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas on March 15, 2022. (Samantha Burcart/Getty Images for SXSW/Getty Images)
Zuckerberg added that Meta expects “by the end of 2023, the organization will be roughly the same size as ours, if not slightly smaller.”
Meta stock is down about 73% so far this year.
| stock code | Safety | Last | Change | Change% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yuan | Meta Platform Company | 90.79 | +1.88 | +2.11% |
META Warns 1 Million Facebook Users About Android, IOS Apps Used to Steal Login Information
Meta investor Altimeter Capital sent an open letter to Zuckerberg and the tech giant’s board last month, calling on them to cut the company’s headcount by 20%.
“Like so many other companies in a zero-rate world — Meta has fallen into excess — too many people, too many ideas, too little urgency,” Altimeter CEO Brad Guss Turner wrote in the letter. “This lack of focus and fitness can be masked when growth is easy, but it can be fatal when growth slows and technology changes.”
Facebook’s Meta logo is seen at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Oct. 10. February 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File/AP Photo)
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Zuckerberg’s rebranding of Facebook to Meta last year has struggled to gain traction as the company shifts its focus to the metaverse.
Meta employed 87,300 people at the end of September, up 28 percent from a year earlier.