Facebook parent Meta to reduce headcount over next year: Mark Zuckerberg

As Big Tech companies lay off employees and freeze new hiring, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that the company`s plan is to steadily reduce headcount growth over the next year.

Admitting that the social network has entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business, Zuckerberg said that many "teams are going to shrink so we can shift energy to other areas inside the company".

"I want to give our leaders the ability to decide within their teams where to double down, where to backfill attrition and where to restructure teams while minimising thrash to the long-term initiatives," he told the analysts during the company`s quarterly earnings call late on Wednesday.

Facebook reported a 1 per cent drop in revenue to $28.8 billion in the second quarter. The shares dropped 3.8 per cent in extended trading late on Wednesday. Overall, Meta`s profit fell 36 per cent to $6.7 billion in the quarter.

Zuckerberg said that they hired a lot of people earlier this year, which means that its reported year-over-year headcount growth will still be substantial for the next few quarters, "but it should continue to decline over time".

"Now this is a period that demands more intensity, and I expect us to get more done with fewer resources," he emphasised.

In this environment, "we`re focused on making the long-term investments that will position us to be stronger coming out of this downturn, including our work on our discovery engine and Reels, our new ads infrastructure and the metaverse".

However, given the more recent revenue trajectory, "we are slowing the pace of these investments and pushing some expenses that would have come in the next year or two off to a somewhat longer time line", said the Meta CEO.

Meta now has 83,553 employees, an increase of 32 per cent year-over-year.

Several Big Tech firms like Microsoft, Google, Snap, Twitter, Spotify and others have either shrunk their workforce or reduced/frozen hiring for the rest of the year.