Uber cut a third of its-1,200 strong marketing team as it moved to slash costs after posting a $1-billion loss in the first quarter following its IPO.
The global ride-hailing firm, which went public despite never making a single dollar in profit, said it laid off 400 employees in multiple offices around the world.
The announcement came just a week before its second-quarter results were due.
The company has about 25,000 employees globally, nearly half of them based in the U.S., according to recent regulatory filings.
“We are not making these changes because marketing has become less important to Uber,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a note to staff. “This happens naturally as companies get bigger, but it is something we need to address, and quickly.”
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 55: Howard Franklin
This is part 1 of “The Swamp” series. Jamarlin talks to corporate lobbyist Howard Franklin, who has represented Amazon, Google, and Sprint. We unpack former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s saying, “lobbyists write our laws,” and debate whether taking on the swamp should be a top 5 issue in Black America. We also discuss AIPAC aggressively recruiting at HBCUs and whether voters for the pro-Israel lobby group blew up Andrew Gillum’s campaign for governor of Florida.
Uber has rarely cut employees in the last decade but its employees were referring to the latest downsize as the “marketing red wedding” in reference to a famously gruesome murder scene in Season 2 of the popular TV series, “Game of Thrones”.
The Uber job cuts inspired a rare display of solidarity in Silicon Valley. Immediately after the layoff announcement was made, a spreadsheet dedicated to connecting the laid-off employees with potential new jobs started going viral across Twitter and LinkedIn.
