José M. Rodríguez SIlva

Updated Thursday, February 15, 2024-02:31

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The publication of the results of the large American technology companies has been accompanied by real stock market parties on Wall Street that continue the

excellent performance on the stock market

of most of the companies known as the 'Magnificent Seven', with the exception of Tesla, which has been affected by other problems.

For some of these companies, 2023 was not only a particularly good year in the market, but it was also dubbed

the 'Year of Efficiency

' due to the wave of layoffs that occurred between the end of 2022 and January 2023 and that, In a more selected way, it seems to be repeating itself at the start of 2024.

Now, the publication of the results has revealed the bill that these companies have paid in compensation to their staff:

4,400 million dollars

(4,082 million euros at the current exchange rate) to be distributed between

Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta

, for a reduction of almost 43,000 workers.

With 1.8 billion dollars disbursed to lighten its payroll list,

Google, or rather its parent company Alphabet, is the company that recognizes a greater disbursement

, which also contrasts with the fact that, in proportion, it is one of the companies that has reduced the least its number of employees with a cut of 7,732 workers to go from just over 190,000 to

182,502

.

Another even more surprising case is that of

Microsoft

. The company, which publishes its results in June,

maintained the same number of workers

in June 2023 as in June 2022, despite having laid off 5% of its workforce globally, equivalent to about 10,000 employees, and having invested

800 million dollars

to pay the corresponding compensation.

This is because the company

has added employees in the rest of the world

, which compensate for the loss of about 2,000 positions in the United States. At the same time, it has slimmed down its administration and commercial areas, but increased the number of developers.

Predictably, the numbers of employees of the Redmond-based company will increase when they show the report for the year 2024, since they will include the workers of the acquired

Activision-Blizzard

, in which, however, they have also already carried out a workforce reduction.

META AND AMAZON

The case of

Meta

is perhaps the most famous for starting the movement and having carried out

several waves of personnel cuts

, with special focus on areas such as the metaverse.

The technology company has been the one that has ended the year with the greatest difference in employees,

almost 20,000 fewer

, for a total of just over 67,000 at the end of the course. In total, the investment in this cut was close to 1.2 billion dollars.

Finally, Amazon has made an investment in

its restructuring of 640 million euros

corresponding to compensation from the plan that began at the end of 2022 to resize its workforce. His case is significant, since, despite reducing its workforce by 16,000, it continues to employ more than 1.5 million people around the world, which is

equivalent to three times the sum of the workforce of Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

.

EVOLUTION BY 2024

With the impact of AI on employment, it is still uncertain whether the waves of layoffs in the technology sector are here to stay or will be reduced or focused on specific departments.

It seems that

the demand for efficiency on the part of the markets continues to exist

, as well as the reward for companies that reduce costs to improve their profitability, but a drop in rates could be decisive for investors to start rewarding growth again.

Sectors such as

video games

are being especially hit due to the potential that is seen in this technology for the development of these products and a brake on the growth of consumption.

On the other hand, this does not mean that the market has stopped. Companies continue to demand technological talent, especially, as you can guess in the field of artificial intelligence, where specialists are

earning well over $100,000

a year.