Meta: Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said that 13% of its global workforce, or around 11,000 workers, would be let go. It’s the 18-year-old social media behemoth’s first round of mass layoffs.
Singapore’s Asia-Pacific headquarters were also affected. According to media estimates, out of the 1,000 projected employees in Singapore, potentially up to 100 have been impacted, with the bulk being software engineers and other computer professionals.
According to data from the Singapore Ministry of Manpower for 2021, approximately 45,000 of the 177,100 people who have work passes are from India. The highest qualified foreign professionals who are permitted to work in the nation are those who hold employment passes and must make at least SGD 5,000 ($3,700) per month.
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There is no doubt that many of these are impacted by the layoffs at Meta as well as other tech-related redundancies.
In response to slow consumer spending, rising interest rates, and inflation, technology companies around the world, including in Singapore, a significant tech hub where many of the big giants have their regional headquarters, are halting recruiting or reducing.
The parent firm of Shopee and Garena, publishers of games like League of Legends and Free Fire, and Sea Limited, a Singapore-based gaming and e-commerce behemoth, made two rounds of layoffs and revoked job offers in June and September. According to the company’s most recent annual report, Sea had 67,300 employees as of the end of 2021, more than doubling its number from the year before.
In order to increase profitability by strengthening its position in its key markets and core products, the company reduced its overseas footprint and peripheral businesses after posting a net loss of $931 million in the second quarter of this year, amid rising borrowing costs and a slowing global economy.
Although the corporation kept the number of job layoffs a secret, it is believed that hundreds of people may lose their jobs at its offices worldwide, including those in Singapore.
According to Jessica Huang Pouleur, a partner at venture capital company Openspace, “Last year, a lot of what happened was a lot of cheap funding in the market flooded the market (which) allowed companies to develop really at any cost.What happened was people hired very rapidly. You have a problem; you just throw people at it. I think we’ll likely see more of it to come over the course of the next few months.”
The Singapore-based digital wealth manager StashAway, which let go of 31 employees, or 14% of its workforce, and the currency exchange Crypto.com, which let go of 260 employees, or 5% of its workforce in Singapore, are two Southeast Asian businesses that reduced their workforces in the middle of the year.
iPrice, a Malaysian online retailer, also laid off 250 people, or 25% of its workforce, at the same time as Zenius, an Indonesian provider of educational technology, laid off more than 200 workers.
Start-up for digital payments was in November. Among the businesses that made staff layoffs in their Singapore locations were payment processor Stripe and the social media platform Twitter.
On November 3, Stripe said that it would reduce 1,000 global jobs, or 14%, from its staff.
After the layoffs, Stripe will employ around 7,000 people. Some jobs in Singapore were also hit.
A week following Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter fired 3,700 employees, or almost half of its global workforce, a day later. People working in the Singapore office also experienced this. The engineering, sales, and marketing departments’ employees were among those impacted, according to Singapore’s Straits Times.
Due to a decrease in venture capital financing levels this year, startups in the area were significantly impacted. In the first quarter of 2022, funding in the region decreased by 7% to $36.3 billion from the same quarter in 2022, according to a Crunchbase analysis.
As a result of people spending more time at home due to the COVID pandemic and developing habits that increased demand for internet services, many IT firms experienced fast growth. Some of these behaviours have changed when consumer behaviour started to normalise following the lockdowns. All tech companies are under pressure as a result of this, as well as inflation and rising interest rates. The recent decline in share prices of major IT companies is referred to as an overdue correction by some.
While short-term market volatility and effects on revenue and employment in the tech sector are projected, long-term growth is anticipated for the sector.
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