Salesforce plans to chop potentially thousands of jobs worldwide within weeks, the company said Wednesday, marking a grim start to 2023 for a tech sector that’s already reeling from layoffs.
The tech titan said it aims to cut 10% of its workforce and warned that the potential job cuts could begin in short order. The notice came in a regulatory filing and in a letter to employees from the company’s chief executive officer.
“We’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 percent, mostly over the coming weeks,” Mark Benioff, Salesforce’s chief executive officer, wrote in the letter to the company’s employees.
This means that potentially 7,000 or more Salesforce workers could be losing their jobs, based on information the company had previously provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
San Francisco-based Salesforce, as of January 2022, employed 73,541 workers worldwide, the company stated in an SEC filing in early 2022.
The company’s top boss acknowledged that Salesforce erred by hiring workers too quickly in the wake of fevered demand by businesses and consumers for tech services and products during the coronavirus outbreak and the resulting COVID-linked lockdowns and work-from-home trends.
Salesforce miscalculated what might be the demand for its products and services once the coronavirus impacts began to ebb, Benioff said in the message to the company’s workers.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how we came to this moment,” Benioff stated in the letter. “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”
