As the unspoken king of the PC business-Microsoft enters a new fiscal year, the company has announced job cuts across geographies, to trim down on operation costs, probably a courtesy of the coronavirus and changing landscape of the industry. However, the tech giant did not share any details regarding the roles being eliminated or the geographies being impacted.
Even though the company has not disclosed any official numbers, Business Insider reports that Microsoft might just have laid under 1,000 employees this week.
Last month, Microsoft decided to close down all its physical stores due to the fact that the sales from these outlets simply paled in comparison to their online counterparts. Moreover, the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the already bad condition of the offline retail side, pushing Microsoft to take this decision. Thus, the company agreed to a pre-tax asset impairment charge of $450 million and shut its physical stores. It is quite possible that the job cuts are from its retail stores, even though the company said that it would find other positions for its staff.
This isn’t the first time we are hearing from Microsoft implementing job cuts. Earlier it had cut roles at MSN, its online news portal, positions that were filled by AI powered algorithmic news feed systems were brought in to power up the performance. The same path was followed for its Azure cloud division as well.
Q3 results of Microsoft include a 15% increment of revenue in Productivity and Business Processes. There was also a 27% increment in Intelligent Cloud’s revenue and a 3% hike in more Personal Computing. The company’s revenue rose 15% to $35.02 billion in the same quarter.
With these turn of events, it is bizarre how Microsoft is pushing for more technologically progressive methods with lesser workforce to pump up profits.
