Twitter to lay off 8 per cent of work force to be faster and 'nimbler' on its feet, says CEO Dorsey
Twitter Inc will lay off up to 336 employees, or about 8 per cent of its workforce, as co-founder Jack Dorsey readies to revive growth in the microblogging service provider’s user base in his second stint as chief executive.
The layoffs, primarily in the company’s product and engineering functions, come a week after Dorsey took over as permanent CEO.
Shares of Twitter, which had about 4,100 employees globally as of June 30, rose as much as 6 per cent in morning trading on Tuesday.
"We feel strongly that engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team, while remaining the biggest per centage of our workforce," Dorsey said in a letter to employees. "And the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel."
FBN Securities analyst Shebly Seyrafi, however, said the company needed to focus also on "rationalizing sales" along with engineering to achieve its margin targets.