If this earnings season is teaching us anything, it’s that the tech giants are shifting focus from profligate spending and unrestrained expansion to streamlining operations and cutting costs wherever they can.
The past year’s market downturn has been especially hard on Silicon Valley’s behemoths, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq index down 15% since the beginning of 2022. The likes of Apple, Amazon, and Facebook parent Meta saw their valuations surge by billions throughout the 2010s, and their rapid growth was bookended in 2020 and 2021, when many tech companies became “pandemic darlings”—their product sales were boosted by stay-at-home orders, and several companies embarked on unprecedented hiring sprees.
