Google has already spent almost 3 billion dollars on layoffs since 2023, according to report

Alphabet, the company that owns Google, has already spent a considerable amount of money to lay off employees. The company itself revealed the values ​​behind the latest mass layoffs through its most recent financial report, which takes into account the last quarter of 2023.

According to official Alphabet data analyzed by The Verge, the company has already spent US$2.1 billion with the layoff of more than 12 thousand people throughout 2023. Furthermore, the recent layoffs made in the first month of this year cost another US$700 million of the company's coffers.

This money is directed to the payment of compensation packages, contractual terminations and temporary guarantees for dismissed employees.

Furthermore, the closure of offices around the world involved expenses of US$ 1.8 billion in 2023. The idea of ​​these actions is to save money in the long term, but there is a momentary cost with the moving process and eventual payments to the property owners, for example.

Google expected to continue layoffs in 2024

Google has announced two rounds of layoffs in recent weeks. In the first of these, the hardware and Assistant teams were affected, with hundreds of employees laid off.

Google's devices division suffered from layoffs as early as 2024.Source: GettyImages

The second cut occurred the following week and was in the search engine's advertising and publicity team, one of the company's biggest sources of revenue. Sundar Pichai, executive manager of the company, has already indicated that other cuts should take place in the coming months.

Despite ongoing spending and restructuring, Alphabet ended the final quarter of 2023 with revenue of $86 billion, a value 13% above the same period of the previous year.

The most profitable segments for the brand are ads on the search engine and cloud storage services. In addition, Google plans to increase gains from the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, especially after the revelation of Gemini language models.