As we approach the latter part of March 2024, the flood of layoffs in the tech sector doesn’t appear to be abating. The industry’s major companies are continuing to reduce their workforces due to ongoing economic difficulties. The top 5 tech companies that reduced staff members significantly this month are shown below.
As demand for 5G lags, Ericsson plans to lay off 1,200 people.
The largest telecom company in Sweden, Ericsson, revealed on March 25 that it will be laying off 1,200 workers in its home nation due to a decline in the market for 5G network equipment. The reductions are a part of a larger 2024 cost-cutting strategy that also calls for cutting facilities, simplifying procedures, and hiring fewer consultants.
According to Ericsson, this year’s “challenging mobile networks market” is expected to see additional volume reduction as consumers continue to exercise caution with their spending. By the end of 2023, the corporation employed about 100,000 people worldwide, having reduced its staff by 8,500, or 8%, the previous year due to cost-cutting measures.
Dell trims staff in an effort to cut costs.
As part of larger cost-cutting initiatives, which also included restricting external hiring and reorganizing staff, Dell Technologies has reduced its employment, the firm revealed in a filing dated March 25. Dell employed over 120,000 people as of February 2, compared to roughly 126,000 a year earlier.
The slow demand for Dell’s PCs, which resulted in an 11% decline in Q4 revenue, is what led to the layoffs. Dell issued a warning about impending difficulties and growing input prices even though it anticipates growth in sales from its client solutions sector, which houses PCs, this year.
Apple stops its microLED display project and fires dozens of employees
According to a March 22 Bloomberg article, Apple has stopped its internal efforts to produce microLED displays for a future Apple Watch model, signaling the end of another expensive R&D program (following the Apple Car division). Despite the displays’ promise of more vivid and brighter images, they proved to be too complicated and costly to explore further.
Consequently, Apple reorganized its teams responsible for developing displays and let go of a number of staff members in both Asia and the United States. While certain affected staff might be reassigned within, others could be let go and given a severance pay,
IBM cuts employees in marketing and communications
According to a CNBC article citing a source familiar with the situation, Jonathan Adashek, IBM’s chief communications officer, notified staff members in the marketing and communications division of upcoming job losses during a meeting that lasted about seven minutes on March 12.
The layoffs are a part of IBM’s most recent “workforce rebalancing” initiatives, which came after the business announced in August of last year that it intended to replace some 8,000 positions with AI technologies. According to IBM, its staff will be about the same size globally by the end of 2024 as it was at the beginning of the year.
Turnitin’s CEO views AI as a way to reduce staffing.
About fifteen employees were let go by the plagiarism detection company. Turnitin earlier this year due to organizational changes, according to a March 7 TechCrunch story. In light of CEO Chris Caren’s remarks from the previous year, indicating that Turnitin might slash its technical staff by 20% in just 18 months thanks to AI, the layoffs are significant.
Thanks to AI-driven efficiencies, Caren had said that someday, the company will “need 20% of those number of people” out of the few hundred engineers it had at the time. Turnitin employs machine learning techniques to detect instances of plagiarism in student essays.
In summary, it seems that for the time being, workforce reductions are an unavoidable reality. In addition to the ongoing economic uncertainty, workers also have to worry about the potential threat posed by generative AI. There will probably be more names added to this unpleasant list in the upcoming months.