PayPal announces the layoff of 2,000 employees

PayPal adds to the (very) long list of big tech companies that are “cutting down” their staff. After Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, IBM or even Googleso it’s PayPal’s turn to announce a massive layoff plan: “We will reduce our global workforce by approximately 2,000 full-time employees, which represents approximately 7% of our total workforce” thus declared Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, in an e-mail addressed yesterday evening to the employees. Bloomberg estimates that this drastic reduction in payroll could save no less than $1.3 billion this year, which will no doubt “smooth out” fairly lackluster performance over the past few quarters.

As often in this case, the global context, and therefore the inflationary crisis, are evoked to explain these always tough decisions. Dan Schulman explains that PayPal had already begun several months ago to restructure to reduce its costs, but these efforts would therefore not have been enough. “We must continue to change as our world, our customers and our competitive environment evolve” concludes Schulman. We would almost forget that the volume of payments on PayPal has continued to grow in 2022, i.e. 1400 billion dollars over the past year and +9.6%. So of course, PayPal’s growth is no longer that of 5 years ago, but the online payment giant is not really in the red…