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Mark Zuckerberg: "Achieve more with fewer resources"
Photo: Eric Risberg/AP
The Facebook group Meta is facing austerity measures after the weakening of its business.
Founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg prepared the employees in an internal question and answer session for a hiring freeze and budget cuts in some areas, as reported by the financial service Bloomberg, among others.
Meta will be smaller in 2023 than this year, Zuckerberg said.
In the last quarter, Meta posted the first drop in sales since the Facebook group went public in 2012.
Profit was down 36 percent but was still $6.7 billion.
The management referred, among other things, to concerns about the economy and inflation, which made advertisers more economical.
At the same time, Facebook and Instagram are struggling with the competition from the video app TikTok.
Apple's measures to better protect privacy on the iPhone also messed up the business model.
At the same time, the focus on virtual worlds – the »metaverse« – entails development costs in the billions.
According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg said he had hoped that the economy would have stabilized more in the meantime.
But since it doesn't look like it, Meta wants to plan more carefully.
There should be budget cuts across various areas.
Meta had grown rapidly in recent years, in part to meet security and hate speech filtering requirements.
As of June 30, the Group had 83,553 employees, compared to 63,404 a year earlier.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta will impose a hiring freeze to cut costs.
The group plans to reduce its costs by at least ten percent, the newspaper reported.
Meta declined to comment on the report upon request, but referred to statements by Zuckerberg in late July.
At the time, he had expressed the expectation “that we would achieve more with fewer resources”.
Zuckerberg sees the future of the Internet in the so-called metaverse, virtual worlds in which users work, play and communicate using avatars.
That's why he renamed Facebook to Meta a year ago.
mbö/dpa/AFP/Reuters
