TikTok, Yahoo, GitHub, and Baxter lay off employees 

TikTok

On Monday, Bytedance-owned social media app TikTok terminated its entire workforce in India, which consisted of around 40 employees. The India office staff was primarily responsible for the Brazil and Dubai markets. 

According to a report by Economic Times, the affected employees will receive up to nine months of severance pay.

The move has not been an unexpected one as the platform was banned in India approximately three years ago. Additionally, the employees were informed that February 28 would be their last day and were encouraged to search for other job opportunities. They were also given the reason that restarting operations in India was not going to be feasible due to the government’s stance on Chinese apps. 

A TikTok spokesperson stated, “We have decided to shut down our India remote sales support centre, which was established in late 2020 to assist our global and regional sales teams. We greatly value these employees and the impact they have had on our company, and we will provide them with support during this challenging time.”

Yahoo

Joining the layoff spree, Yahoo is cutting 20 per cent of its workforce, amounting to 1,600 employees. The decisionsis reportedly going to affect half of the company’s advertising technology business. 

In a conversation with Axios, Jim Lanzone, CEO, Yahoo, stated that these  job cuts will represent more than half of the staff in the company’s ad tech unit and over 20 per cent of its total workforce. Additionally, these changes will be ‘extremely beneficial for Yahoo’s overall profitability’.

The company has announced that it will also be closing its supply-side platform (SSP) business, which provided support to digital publishers in selling automated ads with their content.

In the next half-year, Yahoo also plans to lay off an additional 8 per cent of its employees, which equates to approximately 600 workers. 

Baxter

Baxter, a medical device manufacturer, has forecast a 2023 profit that is below the expectations of Wall Street and announced that it may cut up to 5 per cent of its worldwide workforce. This has caused the company’s shares to drop to $38.58, the lowest it has been in nearly seven years. 

Along with the ongoing inflationary pressures and increasing inventory costs, the company is also facing supply chain shortages, as well as rising costs for raw materials, labour, and transportation, common issues for medical device makers. 

Additionally, Baxter is in the process of separating its kidney care units and considering options for its biopharma solutions business, including a possible sale. To streamline its operations, the company plans to consolidate into four units and begin reporting its financial results based on these new segments in the latter half of 2023. Baxter anticipates saving more than $300 million through its cost reduction plans, including layoffs, in 2023.

GitHub

Microsoft-owned GitHub has revealed that it will be cutting 10 per cent of its workforce by the end of the company’s fiscal year. According to Fortune, the company had approximately 3,000 employees before this announcement. In addition, all of GitHub’s offices will be closed as their leases expire, partly due to low usage, and the company will transition to a primarily remote work model.

GitHub will maintain its previously declared hiring freeze, first announced in January, and will implement various other internal modifications to secure the immediate well-being of the company.

Thomas Dohmke, CEO, GitHub informed the employees about the decision in an email explaining the reasons to take such drastic steps. He said, “Sustained growth is important for every business. For GitHub, this means that we continue to enable more productive developers across the globe and move quickly as our opportunities to help our customers change. Today, we are the home of 100M developers, and we must become the developer-first engineering system for the world of tomorrow.”

Dohmke also mentions the company’s plans to expand further. He states that the company will coordinate its efforts with the domains where GitHub have the most significant impact. However, the sudden change will also entail alterations leading to a decrease in GitHub’s personnel by 10 per cent until the end of the fiscal year 2023. 

Additionally, the company has also made several more decisions to cut their operational cost. Two of them have been also mentioned in the mail – “We will provide more information and plans for the transition in the coming months, but I wanted to share two decisions with you: i) Beginning immediately, we will extend the laptop refresh cycle from three years to four years. ii) We will switch to Microsoft Teams for video conferencing only, which will result in substantial savings and simplify cross-company and customer communication. This transition will be completed by September 1, 2023. Slack will still be used as our primary tool for day-to-day collaboration.”

Lastly, Dohmke expressed his gratitude to all the Hubbers and thanked them for dedication, resilience, and passion to empower millions of software developers around the globe.