Jeff Bezos’s Amazon has announced one of the largest wave of layoffs so far in 2023
(Picture: Getty Images)Tech firms have laid off over 20,000 staff in the first 10 days of 2023 as chief executives scramble to find efficiencies amid dwindling consumer demand and plummeting share prices.
Over 30 tech firms have laid off a combined 20,743 staff since the beginning of the year, according to online redundancy tracker layoffs.fyi, adding to the more than 150,000 that were laid off in 2022.
Cloud software firm Salesforce and Jeff Bezos’s e-commerce giant Amazon have announced among the highest redundancies so far this year, at 8,000 apiece, followed by crypto exchange Coinbase which announced it was letting go of 950 staff yesterday.
The Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector Index has dropped some 35% since the beginning of 2022, while some of the world’s largest tech companies have seen their stock prices plummet further still, with the likes of Tesla down 67%, and Facebook owner Meta down 60%, over the same period.
US firms have so far borne the brunt of the efficiency drive, with only around 2,500 jobs being lost at London-based tech businesses since January last year.
Konstantin Sidorov, chief executive of the London Technology Club, told the Standard: “If you’re too healthy and too rich sometimes you forget about efficiency because you have so much money to spend, you try and buy this and develop that…and you lose focus – if you try and spread resources too thin that can be a problem for your core business.
“If companies are trying to layoff what they don’t see as strategic and concentrate resources on what they believe is most competitive there is nothing wrong with this.”
