Apple Inc. has become the latest major tech company to put a lid on its hiring and also decelerate its spending, thus adding proof that even the biggest Silicon Valley firms are becoming cautious of an impending recession in the United States. This comes after at least three other tech majors, including GoogleMicrosoft and Amazon put a freeze on their hiring and even laid off employees while also deciding not to make new investments, to cut costs ahead of the recession.
As per a report by Bloomberg on Monday, the iPhone maker, one of the largest companies of the world, wants to put a cap on expenditures and job growth at some of its sectors but has not taken up a companywide policy. This cautious stance displayed by Apple mimics the approach taken by its tech peers including, Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp., which, as mentioned above, have taken measures to cut costs.
Shares of Apple went down the hill by 2.06 per cent at close on Monday on the news.
However, most of the biggest the tech giants, for now are not talking about eliminating its employees and are only focussed on reducing the pace of hiring. Bloomberg reported that overall US job growth hasn’t stalled, with payrolls increasing by 372,000 in June.
Last week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Google will slow down hiring at the company through the rest of the year and 2023, while also keeping a check on investments for the same period of time. However, he clarified that Google was not freezing its hiring process. “Because of the hiring progress achieved so far this year, we’ll be slowing the pace of hiring for the rest of the year, while still supporting our most important opportunities,” he said, adding that Google will be more focussed on hiring at engineering, technical and other critical roles.
However, that is not the case with every tech company out there, not even the biggest ones. Microsoft has cut jobs spanning a variety of groups including consulting and customer and partner solutions and were dispersed across geographies. The layoffs affected less than 1 per cent of its 180,000-person workforce, spanned across groups ranging from consulting and customer and partner solutions and were dispersed across geographies, reported Bloomberg earlier. The company said it is still likely to end the year with increased number of employees.
Elon Musk-owned Tesla Inc had last month laid off hundreds of employees and closed a California facility, meant for its Autopilot self-driving technology, Bloomberg reported quoting people familiar with the matter. The company’s AI and Autopilot leader Andrej Karpathy also announced his departure from the company earlier last week.
Amazon, which has now become overstaffed from excess hiring during the pandemic, said that the company was working through that problem with attrition. In some cases, Amazon is subleasing warehouse space and has paused development of facilities meant for office workers, as per reports.
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