On Monday, Uber laid off 350 employees. It’s an indication that the company is attempting to positively react to the growing concerns among investors that it’s excessively losing money. The layoff is the third registered in the recent months. As a result, the ride-hailing company focused on the following operations; autonomous vehicle unit, customer support, and recruiting. Uber spokesman noted that since the beginning of July, the company has laid off more than 1,000 jobs. This is more than 2% of the company’s total workforce. In May, Uber’s shares started trading on Wall Street. This was recognized as one of the most predictable early public offerings in the past few years. However, Uber’s stock performance has been disappointing. Its price has been below 3% since the first time of trading.
Uber investors gave a favorable reaction to the current layoffs. On Monday, they expressed their satisfaction with the incentives that the organization was putting in place. According to The Verge, layoffs made Uber’s shares prices to shoot up by 4% in the afternoon trading. Back in July, Uber retrenched over 400 employees. All these employees were stationed in their marketing department. In September, it laid off 435 employees. These people were from its product and engineering department. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber Chief Executive, had extended his plea to the executives to cut the number of employees and reorganize the firm. The chief executive wrote an email to the staff announcing the latest layoffs.
He addressed the team, letting them know that the firm had to do everything in its power to reinstate a new normal on how operations were being executed. He pointed out that identifying and getting rid of duplicate work and still remain to uphold high standards of practice were the solutions they were in search of. He said that the firm wanted few employees that would give direct and accurate feedback and make the right decisions to take the correct actions when expectations are not being met and attempting to cut off the bureaucracy that assumes to creep as an organization grows.
Uber’s autonomous car unit was scrapped from Uber back in April. This was after Toyota, SoftBank, and the Japanese automaker had injected $ 1 billion in the deal. The total value for the Autonomous Technology Group deal was valued at $7.25 billion. Since this spun occurred, the ride-hailing company has been a haven for controversies. The firm has been filing lawsuits related to theft claims from its employees.
