PayPal To Axe 9 Percent Of Global Workforce

PayPal has confirmed some bad news for its staff, after warning of a significant round of lay-offs at the payments firm.

Reuters reported on Tuesday that it had seen a letter from CEO Alex Chriss to PayPal staff, in which he confirmed the firm is planning to cut about 2,500 jobs, or 9 percent of its global workforce, in 2024.

The sword of Damocles will not be held over employees for long though, as impacted staff are expected to be notified by the end of the week.

Job cuts

According to Reuters in his letter to staff, newly appointed CEO Chriss said the decision was made to “right-size” the company through both direct cuts and the elimination of open roles throughout the year.

“We are doing this to right-size our business, allowing us to move with the speed needed to deliver for our customers and drive profitable growth,” Chriss is quoted as writing in the letter.

The company also posted the letter entitled ‘Preparing for the Future’ to its website after market close.

“While I have been encouraged by the innovation our team is delivering, we must execute faster and ensure we are focused on solving our customers’ most critical needs and problems,” wrote Chriss.

“Specifically, across our organisation, we need to drive more focus and efficiency, deploy automation, and consolidate our technology to reduce complexity and duplication,” he wrote. “We have started on that journey, but there is a lot of work to do – and 2024 marks a year of change, including some difficult but necessary decisions to get us to where we need to go.”

“Today, I am writing to share the difficult news that we will be reducing our global workforce by approximately 9 percent through both direct reductions and the elimination of open roles over the course of the year,” wrote Chriss.

“We are doing this to right-size our business, allowing us to move with the speed needed to deliver for our customers and drive profitable growth,” he wrote. “At the same time, we will continue to invest in areas of the business we believe will create and accelerate growth.”

Read also : Google Fires 28 Staff Over Israel Protest, Undertakes More Layoffs

Paypal’s shares ended the day down 0.13 percent, Reuters reported.

Last week, the fintech firm had announced it was launching new artificial intelligence-driven products as well as a one-click checkout feature.

Meanwhile, PayPal competitor Block, led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, also began to cut jobs this week as part of its previously disclosed plans to trim headcount and reduce costs, a source told Reuters.

Tech lay-offs

Late last week it was reported that CRM giant Salesforce was laying off 700 workers, or 1 percent of its workforce.

That was on top of the January 2023 announcement that it would axe 10,000 jobs (or 10 percent of its workforce).

Those lay-offs added to the wave of job losses that has impacted the tech industry of late.

Microsoft said last week it was axing 1,900 workers out of the 22,000 people in its gaming division.

But there has been a slew of similar job cuts at other tech giants recently, including eBay, Google, TikTok, and Amazon.

German software giant SAP last week also said it was “restructuring” 8,000 jobs.