PayPal to lay off 2,000 people, 7% of workforce

Theresa Braine, New York Daily News
Updated ·2 min read
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PayPal will dump 7% of its workforce, or about 2,000 people, in the coming weeks, the online payments company announced Tuesday.

While the company has “made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping” itself to function in what it called “the challenging macro-economic environment,” the need for change continued, President and CEO Dan Schulman wrote employees in a message posted to the company’s website.

“Addressing these changes requires us to make hard decisions that will impact some of our colleagues,” he said. “Today, I’m writing to share the difficult news that we will be reducing our global workforce by approximately 2,000 full time employees, which is about 7% of our total workforce.”

PayPal will “treat our departing colleagues with the utmost respect and empathy, provide them with generous packages, engage in consultation where required, and support them with their transitions,” he said. “Our leadership team will communicate regularly and openly.”

PayPal was spun off from parent eBay in 2014 as a standalone company, joining the likes of Google Wallet, Square and, later, Apple Pay in the burgeoning mobile payments industry.

In November the San Jose, California-based company reported third-quarter profit of $1.33 billion and $6.85 billion in revenue, exceeding Wall Street’s expectations. PayPal predicted about $7.38 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, with $27.5 billion expected for the full year.

PayPal Holdings Inc.’s stock closed Tuesday at $81.49, a $1.85 per share increase, or 2.32%.

In a third-quarter earnings call late last year, acting CFO Gabrielle Rabinovich cited inflationary pressures on consumers’ discretionary spending in his look forward for 2023.

The layoffs come after a long line of job cutbacks in the tech sector. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, shed 12,000 workers, or 6% of its workforce. Microsoft will lay off 10,000 people by March, or 5% of its workforce. Leading the way for this month was Salesforce, which announced soon after the turn of the year that it was cutting 10,000 personnel, or 7% of its staff, as CNBC reported.

Spotify last week announced it would cut 600 positions, or 6% of its workforce; Twitter and Amazon have also announced cuts. Late last year, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced a 13% reduction in workforce, cutting 11,000 jobs.