New Delhi: Facebook owner Meta Platforms (META.O) told employees on Friday it would stop developing smart displays and smartwatches and about half of the 11,000 jobs eliminated this week in an unprecedented cost-cutting move were technical roles. Speaking during an employee townhall meeting heard by Reuters, Meta executives also said they were reorganizing parts of the company, combining a voice and video calling unit with other messaging teams and a The new division was establishing the Family Foundation, which focused on difficult engineering problems.
Officials said the first large-scale layoffs in the social media company’s 18-year history affected employees at every level and on every team, including individuals with high performance ratings.
Overall, 54% of the people hired were in business positions and the rest were in technology roles, said Lori Goller, Meta human resources chief. He said Meta’s recruiting team is almost halved.
Officials said another round of job cuts was not expected. But other expenses will have to be cut, he said, adding that reviews regarding contractors, real estate, computing infrastructure and various products are underway.
Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who runs the Metaverse-Oriented Reality Labs division, told employees that Meta Portal will end its work on smart display devices and smartwatches.
Bosworth said Meta decided earlier this year to stop marketing the Portal devices known for their video calling capabilities to consumers and focus on business sales.
As the economy slumped, officials recently decided to make “major changes,” he said.
Bosworth said, “It was just going to take so long to get into the enterprise segment, and with so much to invest, it just felt like the wrong way to invest your time and money.”
The portal was not a major revenue generator and attracted privacy concerns from potential users. Meta hasn’t unveiled any smartwatches yet.
Bosworth said the smartwatch unit will focus on augmented reality glasses. He said that more than half of the total investment in Realme Labs was going into Augmented Reality.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Friday reiterated his apology from Wednesday about cutting the workforce by 13%, telling employees he failed to anticipate Meta’s first drop in revenue.
Meta has been aggressively rented out during the pandemic amid a rise in the use of social media by home-stayed consumers. But business suffered this year as advertisers and consumers held back spending due to rising costs and rapidly rising interest rates.
The company also faced increased competition from TikTok and lost access to valuable user data after Apple made privacy-oriented changes to its operating system that powered its ad targeting system.
Zuckerberg said, “The revenue trend is much lower than what I predicted. I got it wrong again. It was a big mistake in planning for the company. I take responsibility for that.”
Going forward, he said, he was not planning to grow the Reality Labs unit’s workforce “massively.”
Meta shares closed up 1% at $113.02.