Popular social media Twitter now facing an uncertain future. The rumoured sale of the company has yet to materialise and now reports claim the firm is about to make job cuts, again.
According to Bloomberg, Jack Dorsey's company is set to make "widespread" redundancies, and may even announce them this week.
The scale of the cuts, according to the publication's sources who are "familiar with the internal discussions", could be as high as eight per cent of its overall workforce. This would equate to 300 people – although it is said a final decision has not yet been taken.
Twitter has declined to comment on the speculations but the social network is due to announce its third quarter financial reports on Thursday October 27.
At the same time last year, Twitter made a similar round of redundancies. A filing made to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US in October 2015 said the firm was planning to make 8 percent of its staff redundant. Dorsey said there were "significant structural changes" being made in the product and engineering teams, with the rest of the company being "streamlined".
However, there is some confusion about the initial report and this most recent one. For instance, the initial round of redundancies reportedly wiped out eight percent of the staff, which equated to 300 people a year ago. If the workforce was reduced by 300 in 2015, then eight percent of the current (unknown) total number of employees would seemingly be less, as there were fewer people on the payroll this time around. The similarity in the numbers between the two reports is also a red flag but Twitter is refusing to comment on the speculation and it may be that the rumoured job cuts are rounding up.
For a number of years Twitter has not shown the same levels of growth as its biggest rivals: Facebook and Snapchat. As a move to increase subscriptions, Twitter has added a host of new features – some of which address abuse and trolling on the site. Anybody is now able to apply for a blue tick, there's a new quality filter, the length of some tweets has changed, and the site has heavily moved into the live-streaming vide market.
Most recently, the company has reportedly been up for sale. In September, reports said the firm was about to be bid on by Salesforce, Google, or Disney. However, if any offers were made they have not been publicly stated and the deal has yet to move ahead.
In July this year, Twitter's second quarter earnings revealed it had missed analysts' market expectations with revenue of $602m. "We continue to believe that, with disciplined execution against our priorities, we can drive sustained engagement and audience growth over time," chief financial officer Anthony Noto said after the earnings report.
While the company said its revenue saw a 20 per cent year-on-year growth, its user numbers were not as kind.
From July 2015 to July 2016 Twitter added just 3 per cent more people using its service, showing a fairly stagnant growth. For the three months ahead of July 2016, the firm went from 310 million people tweeting to 313m.
0 comments: