Meta stock climbs as the Facebook parent reportedly joins Twitter and other tech firms with massive layoff plans
- Shares of Meta rose Monday after The Wall Street Journal reported mass layoffs are hitting the Facebook parent this week.
- The job cuts are expected to impact thousands of employees and could be announced as soon as Wednesday, per the report.
Shares of Meta climbed more than 3% early Monday following a Wall Street Journal report that the Facebook parent would announce thousands of job cuts as soon as this Wednesday.
As soaring inflation and Fed tightening persist while recession fears abound, an increasing number of companies are trimming their payrolls. Meta joins the likes of Twitter, Amazon, Stripe, and Lyft, among others, that have also announced layoffs in recent weeks.
According to the Journal, the percentage of staffers that Meta will send home is set to be a smaller figure than Twitter's seen in the past week, but it could still shake out to be the largest number of job cuts at a major tech firm to date and mark the firm's first broad job cut in its 18-year history.
On Meta's October 26 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media platform will focus its investments "on a small number of high priority growth areas."
"So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year," he said. "In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size, or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today."
So far in 2022, Meta stock has tumbled more than 72%. The company's market value has fallen by roughly half-a-trillion dollars this year, and Zuckerberg has personally lost more than 60% of his net worth.
In a recent note, Bank of America analysts forecasted that Meta will see a decelerating topline growth, as well as growing pressure from its large metaverse investments. Those, then, will be further weighed down by macro headwinds.
"We believe in the near-term, Meta's topline will remain under pressure as higher interest rates weigh on economic growth and online advertising demand," BofA analysts said.