José M. Rodríguez SIlva
Updated Thursday, February 15, 2024-02:31
Tesla companies: drugs, cronyism and stocks in free fall
Money The 'magnificent seven' of technology that distort Wall Street
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.