Meta, proprietary technology Facebook, Instagram y WhatsApp, is looking for solutions to the business slowdown, caused, in part, by the construction of the metaverse. According to ‘The Wall Street Journal’, the company plans cut your expenses by 10% over the next few months, and for this he wants to resort to downsizing, although without having to directly lay off workers.
As current and former managers familiar with the matter have explained to the American media, the company is putting into practice the ‘silent dismissal‘: It is reorganizing the departments that make it up and giving affected workers a limited time to apply for new positions within the company. If they did not find accommodation in a short period of time, they would end up losing their jobs.
The reduction in the number of workers will not be the only cut that can be expected in Meta during the next few months. It is expected that they will be deeper and deeper and that they will alleviate, as far as possible, the complicated situation of the technology company, quite different from the one in which it found itself a year ago.
During 2022, after years of runaway growth in the heat of the pandemic, Meta’s shares accumulate a value loss of close to 50%. Precisely, this has caused the assets of its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to be reduced by more than half. However, the technology company had 83,553 employees at the end of the second quarter of this year, 32% more than in 2021.
Meta has been warning for weeks that the company plans to make drastic changes to try to ensure that the business is as little affected as possible by the current economic situation it is going through. At an employee conference over the summer, Zuckerberg said the company is in the midst of one of the “worst recessions we’ve seen in recent memory.”
In doing so, the executive made it clear that he expected employees to be willing to work more with fewer resources. He also warned that the level of demand would be higher than in the past.
“I think some of you might decide that this place is not for you,” Zuckerberg said. “Realistically, there are probably a lot of people in the company who shouldn’t be here,” he remarked.
Meta is not the only company that is resorting to ‘silent firing’ in order to cut costs. ‘Wall Street Journal’ notes that Google is doing the same. Specifically, the most famous search engine on the Internet gives workers whose positions have been cut up to 60 days to find a new accommodation, in the case of Meta, the time is reduced to 30.
back to business
Indeed, the social media and targeted advertising giant has been suffering from a slowdown in business since the start of the year, when Facebook first lost users and ad revenue began to slow down.
During the last few months, the company has been looking for a way to paste a facelift to Facebook and Instagramits two crown jewels, with the aim of making them more interesting in the eyes of young users, the most interesting from the point of view of advertisers.
Meta’s plan was to partially imitate TikTok in its applications, the main rival within social networks, favoring video content and suggested publications from accounts that the user does not follow.
Likewise, according to the specialized media ‘The Verge’, the company would have created a team within the company dedicated to working on the development of payment functionalities that could soon reach Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Thanks to this, the company could obtain new income that would alleviate the slowdown in the advertising business and help continue building the metaverse, that new virtual world that, according to Zuckerberg, will become the main source of business for Meta in the medium term. .
Fernando Checa, professor of Communication at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and an expert in social networks, points out in a conversation with ABC that “as much as Zuckerberg wants to bring the new Internet through the metaverse, he cannot know how it will be. the result. What is clear is that it will cost a lot of money.
Checa also expresses that “Meta has become a follower company” due to its tendency to focus on TikTok. From his point of view, the most interesting thing the company could do, if it wants to improve its economic results. it is monetize whatsappwidely used messaging ‘app’ that has more than 2,000 million users worldwide.
