The videoconferencing giant Zoom is more than decimating its staff.
CEO Eric Yuan says he is cutting 15 per cent of the staff and would reduce his salary for the coming fiscal year by 98 per cent and foregoing his FY23 corporate bonus.
While this is admirable, one wonders how you get a corporate bonus at all if your bottom line is so bad that you have to axe 15 per cent of your staff.
Zoom is losing 1,300 employees, or about 15 percent of its staff. Yuan said that “each organisation” across Zoom will be affected by the job cuts.
“We did not take a single departure lightly – our leadership carefully examined and made decisions based on critical priorities for long-term growth, and looked for functions that have become overly complex or duplicative. Some teams will also be adjusting their structures to allow us to better invest in the opportunities ahead,” Yuan said in his message.
For its most recent third quarter, Zoom reported revenue of $1.1 billion and net income of $48 million compared to $1 billion in sales and $340 million in net income during the same period the year before.
Zoom is the latest Bay Area native that’s announced layoffs this year. Amazon in January announced plans to lay off 18,000 people and neighbour Salesforce carried out a round of job cuts that impacted about 7,000 jobs or upwards of 10 percent of its workforce last month. Cisco Systems also eliminated 673 jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area in January.
