As part of its Q3 2016 earnings report today, Twitter has confirmed that it’s laying off 9 percent of its total workforce.
As of June this year, Twitter said that it had 3,860 employees around the world, so this means that the social media company is shedding around 350 employees. As a result of the new round of layoffs, Twitter reckons it will incur cash costs of between $10 million and $20 million, most of which will be severance costs. It estimates there will be a further $5 million to $10 million of expenditure that will largely consist of stock-based compensation.
The layoffs are largely targeted at Twitter’s sales, marketing, and partnerships departments, according to Dorsey during the earnings conference call, with the company revealing that it’s moving from “three sales channels to two.”
https://twitter.com/TwitterIR/status/791605209000574976
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The news comes days after reports began to surface that Twitter was set to announce hundreds more layoffs after failing to find a buyer. Indeed, Twitter’s shares jumped last month after news that Salesforce, Alphabet, and Disney were considering making an offer to buy the company, but all three reportedly walked away. Fresh rumors emerged yesterday, however, that Disney has rekindled its interest in buying the company and has even agreed on a share price.
Today’s round of layoffs comes almost exactly a year after Twitter announced it was cutting up to 336 employees, or 8 percent of its workforce, as part of a “trimming down” exercise. That represented one of Jack Dorsey’s first notable moves after returning to the company as permanent CEO 10 days earlier. Twitter also reportedly laid off engineering staff in Bangalore, India, last month, a move that affected around 20 employees.
While things continue to look not-so-great for the company in general, Twitter actually beat estimates today with quarterly revenue of $616 million, up 8 percent year-on-year (YoY), while it now claims 317 million monthly active users (MAU), up 3 percent on last year. Twitter still doesn’t turn a profit, however, and the company announced a net loss of $103 million for the last quarter.
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