Google’s parent company, Alphabet, released its Q4 2023 earnings on Tuesday and revealed a surprising detail: the company spent billions on severance and other expenses related to layoffs. And it’s still spending big in 2024.
In total, Google spent $2.1 billion USD (about $2.8 billion CAD) on severance and related expenses after laying off over 12,000 employees in 2023. And in 2024, the company has already spent $700 million USD (about $936 million CAD) on severance as part of layoffs of more than 1,000 other roles.
Google also to pay for shutting down physical office space due to the layoffs, a total of $1.8 billion USD (about $2.4 billion CAD) for 2023.
Even with the cuts and payouts, Google still ended 2023 with growth across most of its core businesses and a whopping $86 billion USD (about $115 billion CAD) in revenue for Q4, up 13 percent year-over-year. That includes Google’s primary revenue generator, the search engine business, with $48 billion USD (also a 13 percent jump). There was $10.7 billion USD from Google’s subscription services and devices segment and YouTube’s advertsising revenye was $9.2 billion USD, up 15 percent from the prior year.
Finally, Google’s cloud division, while still behind Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), saw a 25.6 percent year-over-year jump with a reported $9.19 billion USD in revenue.
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Source: The Verge
