Google spent $2.1 billion on layoffs and severance in 2023
What's the story
Google has shelled out a whopping $2.1 billion on severance and related costs for laying off over 12,000 employees throughout 2023. In just the first month of 2024, the tech giant has already spent an extra $700 million on severance for more than 1,000 positions. These eye-opening figures were revealed by Alphabet, Google's parent company, during its Q4 earnings announcement.
Stats
Growth across core business lines despite cuts
It is not all doom and gloom for Google, as the company saw growth in most of its main business areas in 2023. In fact, Google reported $86 billion in revenue for Q4, marking a 13% increase YoY. The search engine business raked in $48 billion, while subscription services and devices earned $10.7 billion, mainly from YouTube TV, YouTube Music and Premium, and Google One subscriptions. Plus, YouTube's ad revenue jumped 15%, hitting $9.2 billion.
AI
The "Gemini Era"
Google's CEO Sundar Pichai dubbed 2024 as Alphabet's "Gemini era," hinting at the AI language model set to work across all core products. Pichai explained, "Gemini is the first realization of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind, bringing together our two world-class research teams." The firm is also working on Gemini Ultra, an improved version of the original Gemini. It will be introduced in a variety of products, beginning with Search.
Losses
Real estate cutbacks cost money
Google, the world's third-largest cloud services provider, clocked $9.19 billion in revenue for Google Cloud. This marks a 25.6% YoY growth. However, it lost quite a lot of money over real estate cutbacks due to layoffs. In 2023, the shuttering of physical office space cost Google a sum of $1.8 billion. To continue its AI investments, Google is likely to make cuts in other divisions. Hence, expect more job cuts in the future.