BUSINESS NEWS
Uber lays off 435 employees, after record $5.2 billion quarterly loss.
Jefferson Graham
USA TODAY
Published 6:28 PM EDT Sep 10, 2019
Struggling ride-hailing giant Uber gave layoff notices to over 400 employees Tuesday.
The company cites nearly 100 million users of its app but hasn’t been able to turn a profit and in August reported a quarterly loss of $5.2 billion.
“It’s critical we get our edge back and continually push ourselves to do better,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a company e-mail, which was obtained by the New York Times.
Tuesday’s cuts were in product and engineering, while July saw another 400 cuts from the Uber marketing team.
According to TechCrunch, Uber is laying off about 8% of the company, with 170 people from product, and 265 from engineering. Most of the layoffs were for U.S.-based employees.
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Uber confirmed the layoffs and released a statement to TechCrunch. “Our hope with these changes is to reset and improve how we work day to day – ruthlessly prioritizing, and always holding ourselves accountable to a high bar of performance and agility. While certainly painful in the moment, especially for those directly affected, we believe that this will result in a much stronger technical organization, which going forward will continue to hire some of the very best talent around the world.”
Uber went public in May but hasn’t had a successful go of it on Wall Street. The stock opened at $41.57 but has since fallen to $33.51 a share.
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