This month, the company announced layoffs across its advertising, hardware, search, shopping, maps, policy, core engineering and YouTube teams.
Subsequently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned employees in an internal letter that the layoffs would continue until the end of 2024.
According to The Verge, referring to the company’s quarterly report, Google spent $2.1 billion on severance and other costs during the layoff of 12,000 people in 2023, and $700 million in the first month of 2024 (about 1,000 people were cut). .
Despite the layoffs, Google ended the 2023 fiscal year with growth in more of its core businesses (Pichai attributed steady growth in digital advertising and cloud computing to Google’s investments in generative AI).
In the fourth quarter, the company’s revenue was $86 billion — 13% more than in the corresponding period last year. The search business brought in $48 billion — 13% more than last year; subscription services and devices — $10 billion (mainly thanks to subscriptions to YouTube Premium and Music, YouTube TV and Google One); but advertising revenue is $9.2 billion (15% more than last year).
Fun fact: Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, and now the video platform generates that much revenue every 16 days.
On a call with investors, Pichai called 2024 the “Gemini era,” the company’s new major language model that is expected to run across all of Google’s core products.
“Gemini is the first realization of the vision we had when we created Google DeepMind, bringing together two world-class research groups,” Pichai said. “Gemini Ultra is coming soon. The team is already working on the next version and bringing it to our products, starting with Search.”
Google is now the third largest cloud provider in the world, trailing only Microsoft Azure and AWS. However, the cloud division gained momentum last year – Google Cloud earned $9.19 billion (a 25.6% year-over-year increase).
Taking into account such results, the layoffs cost the company pennies, but the company additionally spent $1.8 billion on closing office space for the entire year 2023.
