Google parent to lay off 12,000: CEO Pichai

Tech giant Google’s parent firm Alphabet Inc will lay off 12,000, which is 6% of its workforce, across regions to align people and roles in line with its “highest priorities as a company”, its Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in an email to its employees on Friday.

While India-specific information on this layoff is not officially communicated yet, an employee here said that the expectation is that eventually, the company’s total job cut in the following months will go up to 20,000, of which 8,000 will be in India and the Gurugram office is likely to be shut down by June-July this year.

Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. However, after the story got published, Google replied to DH saying that this information was speculative.

Pichai’s email comes two months after Alphabet’s London-based investor TCI Fund Management, whose stake was valued at $6 billion in November 2022, wrote to CEO Pichai expressing concerns about the company’s high employee count and costs, and asking the management to take “aggressive action”.

“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today,” Pichai said in his email to employees.

“A difficult decision to set us up for the future” read the title of Pichai’s message.

“I am confident about the huge opportunity in front of us, thanks to the strength of our mission, the value of our products and services and our early investments in AI. To fully capture it, we’ll need to make tough choices,” Pichai said.

The affected employees in the US have started receiving communication about their severance, whereas those in other locations will take a longer time due to local laws and practices, he added in the email.

Alphabet will provide a severance package that will include 16 weeks’ salary, plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU (Google stock units) vesting, which is a certificate that entitles its holder to Alphabet Inc capital stock, pay for 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time, and six months of healthcare, job placement services, and immigration support for those affected.

Pichai did not give specifics about the impact on employees in Alphabet’s India offices in Gurugram, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. The layoffs “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels and regions,” he said.

Google directed DH to Pichai’s blog post in reply to our email asking for details regarding the impact of layoffs in India.

However, the layoffs could impact employees in India in the next two months, a Google employee in India, who is in the know of the matter, told DH on condition of anonymity.

“While a few US employees have already got the email regarding the layoff, it has not started happening in Asia-Pacific,” the employee said.

Alphabet’s announcement comes a day after another tech giant Microsoft confirmed that it would lay off 10,000 of its workforce. These add to the existing string of tech layoffs being witnessed across the globe after the tech rout in 2022 forced companies including Amazon, Meta and Twitter to cut their employee count to save costs.