PayPal said it will cut 2,000 staffers worldwide as it contends with a macroeconomic slowdown that is weighed on the firm’s business in recent quarters. The cuts, which will affect about 7 per cent of staff, will happen in the coming weeks, chief executive Dan Schulman told employees in a memo.
The company employs more than 2,000 people in Ireland. If cuts were carried out proportionally, that would equate to more than 140 jobs.
“While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do,” Mr Schulman said.
PayPal is the latest tech firm to move to slash staff numbers in recent months, following the likes of Facebook-owner Meta Platforms, Google-owner Alphabet, payments firm Stripe and ecommerce giant Amazon. Twitter has effectively halved its work force since Elon Musk bought the company.
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IDA Ireland interim boss Mary Buckley warned a fortnight ago that more job losses in the technology sector were likely.
“The technology sector is having a tougher time, share prices have been impacted by rising interest rates and all of the global challenges that we are hearing about. We do think there’ll be further losses in the year ahead,” she said. “Ireland has seen the knock-on effects of companies making global decisions to let people go.”
Other companies to have cut staff in recent days include Salesforce and Zendesk, while IBM and Germany’s SAP are also laying off staff.
Mr Schulman has been vocal about his plans to improve his firm’s operating leverage – or the ability to grow revenue faster than expenses – and PayPal last year embarked on a cost-cutting initiative that it said would result in $1.3 billion (€1.2bn) in savings this year.
PayPal moved to lay off more than 300 workers at its Irish operations in Dublin and Dundalk last year, with many of those jobs relocated to Asia and elsewhere, The Irish Times reported at the time. At the time a spokesperson said those cuts were not due to economic conditions.
Still, the company’s stock has been battered by the slowdown in growth in payments on its platform after the pandemic – which spurred a wave of online spending – began to recede.
– Additional reporting Bloomberg
