15 percent of the workforce: Video service Zoom cuts 1,300 jobs

During the corona pandemic, the video conferencing service Zoom was still the big winner. The company is now cutting 1,300 jobs – about 15 percent of the workforce will have to go.

The video conferencing service Zoom has announced major job cuts in view of the uncertain economic situation. “We made the tough but necessary decision to downsize our team by about 15 percent,” CEO Eric Yuan said. Around 1300 employees are to leave.

Yuan also announced reduced salaries and canceled bonuses for top management. He himself will reduce his salary by 98 percent in the coming fiscal year.

Response to employment boom during Corona crisis

At the beginning of the Corona crisis, Zoom benefited greatly from the home office trend and reacted with a hiring offensive that later turned out to be oversized.

The company has been struggling since the end of the pandemic-related boom. Zoom only lowered its sales forecast for 2022 in November, citing falling demand for the video conferencing platform and increasing competition from Cisco’s WebEx, Salesforce’s Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

With job cuts, Zoom is right in line with the industry trend. In the past few weeks and months, a number of other tech companies – including Facebook parent Meta, the world’s largest online retailer Amazon, Google Group Alphabet and Twitter – have reported rounds of layoffs.