Uber fires over 400 employees as profits continue to go downward

Global — Uber reportedly lays-off 435 employees from the product and engineering team as the company continues to lose profits. This is the second round of cuts in recent months since it fired 400 marketing employees in July.

Moreover, the recent layoff cuts the team’s strength by 8 percent, with 170 people from the product team and 265 from engineering.

“Our hope with these changes is to reset and improve how we work day to day. Ruthlessly prioritizing, and always holding ourselves accountable to a high bar of performance and agility,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “While certainly painful in the moment, especially for those directly affected, we believe that this will result in a much stronger technical organization, which going forward will continue to hire some of the very best talents around the world.”

Furthermore, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote an email to its employees regarding the layoff. “The company has gone off course as it grew and must streamline to regain its competitive edge,” the email read. “In the past, we grew our teams rapidly and in a decentralized way. This made sense as we worked to scale the business globally and find product-market fit. But at a certain point, bigger teams do not mean better results. It’s critical we get our edge back and continually push ourselves to do better.”

Despite Uber being more and more accessible to other places, the company still struggles to gain profits. An approximated loss of $5.2 billion was reported last August – its slowest revenue growth ever.

Uber’s downward trend was also observed during its ambitious IPO last May. In fact, experts even considered it as potentially the biggest IPO flop in history, resulting in $5.2 billion loss last quarter.