Facebook owner Meta to lay off 11,000 staff
Facebook owner Meta will lay off more than 11,000 of its staff in "the most difficult changes we've made in Meta's history", boss Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.
He said the cuts represented 13 percent of Meta's workforce and would affect its research lab focusing on the metaverse as well as its apps, which include Facebook, Instagram and messaging platform Whatsapp.
The tech industry is currently in a serious slump and several major firms have announced mass layoffsTwitter's new owner Elon Musk fired half its staff last week.
"I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here," Zuckerberg said in a note to staff. "I know this is tough for everyone, and I'm especially sorry to those impacted."
Ad-supported platforms such as Facebook and Google are suffering from advertisers' budget cuts as they struggle with inflation and rising interest rates.
Zuckerberg told staff he had expected the boost in e-commerce and online activity during the Covid pandemic to continue, but added: "I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that."
Meta's profits fell to $4.4 billion in the last quarter, a 52 percent decrease year-on-year.
South Korea's financial watchdog chief said Monday that the country has not been facing liquidity risk in its overall financial system amid rising worry about a credit crunch.
Lee Bok-hyun, chief of the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), told foreign correspondents in Seoul that volatility in South Korea's economy and financial market grew on the back of the expanded external risk factors, driven by rapid interest rate hikes in major economies and higher energy prices.
Despite the recent funding difficulty in short-term money markets, Lee noted that it was not believed to have been liquidity trouble with the overall financial system.
Worry emerged here over the credit crunch following an insurer's postponement to exercise its bond repayment option and a local government-backed developer's failure to repay bonds.
Heungkuk Life Insurance decided last week to delay the redemption of new capital securities worth 500 million U.S. dollars on the first call date of Nov. 9.
Nippon Steel and ArcelorMittal, two of the world's largest steel companies, have turned their attention to India and Thailand amid weakening demand in Japan and the energy crisis in Europe.
ArcelorMittal is the world's second-largest producer of steel. Headquartered in Luxembourg, it was created in 2006 by the acquisition of European steel maker Arcelor by India's Mittal Steel.