Yet another mass layoff procedure in tech: it’s the turn of eBay, the e-commerce giant. 1000 employees are being made redundant: the platform also announces that it will stop collaborating with a number of subcontractors.
Since the start of the year, massive layoffs have resumed in a number of digital and video game companies, despite an industry that remains profitable. It’s eBay’s turn to announce the layoffs of around 1,000 employees as well as an unspecified number of subcontractors.
9% of eBay employees fired
It is in an internal memo addressed to all employees and published by the company, that we learn that eBay is laying off around 1,000 positions, or 9% of full-time employees.
The reason for the change put forward is the need to better organize the teams. to be faster – allowing us to be more agile, bring together people who work in the same way and make decisions more quickly. » However, Jamie Iannone, the company’s CEO, also writes that eBay’s workforce and expenses have outpaced its growth.
In addition to that, the company announced plans to reduce the number of subcontracting contracts in the coming months, without advancing said number. For the moment, not all of the employees concerned have been informed of their dismissal.
This day, all eBay employees are working from home: Jamie Iannone asked them to be able to talk more intimately with those who will soon be leaving the company.
eBay remains a profitable business
In the same note, eBay nevertheless specifies that it has fundamentally changed the experience on its website and has accelerated the pace of innovation. The company also says it is seeing an increase in customer satisfaction and growing more than the rest of its market.
As recalled The Verge, eBay posted a profit of $1.3 billion for the last quarter in its last financial report of November 2023. It is in this same report that the financial director of eBay, Steve Priest, wrote to be proud of the teams “ which laid the foundations for long-term sustainable growth. » Already at the time, he made it clear that the company had to continue to be prudent in terms of cost efficiency and that it had to save money to invest, “ while remaining good managers of capital for our shareholders. » Furthermore, eBay is in the process of carrying out a financial transaction with its shares in the group that owns Leboncoin.
Layoffs in tech have been increasing since 2024: the hemorrhage continues
Just during this month of January, we relayed on Frandroid number of cases of massive layoffs in the digital industry. In video games, Unity has cut nearly 1,800 positions, and Riot Games 10% of its payroll.
More broadly, in the “ tech “, there is a restructuring of Shadow in France, 35% of Twitch employees leaving (i.e. 500 people), several hundred others at Amazon Prime Video, 1000 new layoffs at Google supplemented by several hundred other positions in its advertising teams, or even 17% of Discord’s workforce laid off. For the month of January 2024 alone, more than 36,000 employees were laid off in the industry and nearly half a million since 2023, according to the site’s reports. LayoffsTracker.