According to insiders, Snap is planning to lay off more than 1,000 employees. At the same time, the photo service loses two top managers to Netflix.
Snap, the company behind the Snapchat app, has been planning to lay off 20 percent of its almost 6,500 employees for a few weeks. As of Wednesday, some departments will be hit harder than others, The Verge reports, citing people familiar with the matter.
Accordingly, in addition to the team responsible for developing mini apps and games within the Snapchat app, Snap’s hardware division is also affected. These include the Spectacles AR glasses and the Pixy camera drone that was announced in April, but has already been discontinued, The Verge continues to report. The advertising department will also be restructured.
Top executives go to Netflix
At almost the same time, the Chief Business Officer, Jeremi Gorman, and the VP of Sales, Peter Naylor, were hired by the streaming provider Netflix to realign sales and better position global marketing. Gorman informed his colleagues at Snap on Tuesday that he would be joining Netflix with Naylor, who is responsible for ad sales in America – Netflix is ​​planning a cheap subscription with commercial breaks
The corona pandemic has hit Snap’s business a lot. According to The Verge, in 2020 the company increased its workforce from almost 3,500 to almost 6,500. In May 2021, the photo service took over the AR display specialist Wave Optics, which also developed the display for the Spectacles – for over half a billion US dollars.
Earned profit only once since going public
With 347 million daily users, Snapchat, while higher in traffic than Twitter, has only made profits once since its IPO in 2017, according to the report. Last year, an investor filed a lawsuit against the photo service because the promise that Apple’s data protection functions would not lead to a reduction in revenue could not be kept and was played down.
According to quarterly figures from July that worried many investors, while Snap’s revenue grew 13 percent from the same period last year and daily active users rose 18 percent, its operating loss rose 108 percent — and the stock price fell nearly 27 percent .
(bme)