According to the San Francisco Chronicle,GoogleBy the end of March, nearly 3 billion yuan had been spent on employee severance pay.This staggering number matches several rounds of large-scaleretrenchmentRelated, layoffs are expected to continue.

The tech giant’s parent company Alphabet said in its financial report on January 30 that Google will spend 2.1 billion yuan on layoffs and related expenses in 2023. It is expected to spend an additional 700 million yuan in the first quarter of 2024, due to the recent layoff of more than 1,000 employees.

Google, headquartered in Mountain View, laid off 12,000 employees in January 2023, which was about 6% of its total workforce at that time. Google has since made several rounds of smaller layoffs, including laying off at least 702 Bay Area employees this month and 100 at its subsidiary YouTube.

Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in a memo that more layoffs were expected, but not as many as last year. “We have ambitious goals and this year we willinvest“Our key priorities,” he wrote. “The reality is that to create the potential for these types of investments, difficult choices must be made.”

This expenditure of about 3 billion yuan is less than 1% of Google’s 2023 full-year revenue of 307.4 billion yuan. Last year’s revenue increased by 9% compared to the previous year.

As remote work reduces demand for offices, Google will also spend 1.8 billion yuan in 2023 to reduce real estate expenses. The company last year subleased 1.4 million square feet of office space in the Silicon Valley market and halted a major project approved in San Jose.

In January this year, many companies including Salesforce, Microsoft, eBay and Amazon also faced a large number of technology layoffs.

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