OCTOBER 14, 2019, BY DARA KERR - It’s the third round in 10 weeks. This time the cuts included staff from the self-driving car and Uber Eats teams.
Uber announced it laid off another 350 employees on Monday from several teams across the company. This is the ride-hailing service’s third round of layoffs over the past 10 weeks and brings the total number of people cut from its payroll to 1,185. Company CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he intends for this to be Uber’s final round of layoffs.
“Days like today are tough for us all,” Khosrowshahi wrote in an email to employees, which was first published by TechCrunch. “The [executive leadership team] and I will do everything we can to make certain that we won’t need or have another day like this ahead of us.”
During this round of layoffs, the company cut employees from the following divisions: self-driving cars, global rides and platform, performance marketing, recruiting and Uber Eats. In the previsions two rounds, Uber laid off staff from its engineering, product and marketing teams.
The layoffs come during a rough period for Uber as it attempts to gain footing as a public company. After debuting on Wall Street in May, the ride-hailing service has seen plummeting stock prices, quarterly revenue loss and an exodus of high-level executives. Three of Uber’s board members have stepped down since then, along with its chief operating officer and chief marketing officer.
Khosrowshahi said that along with the layoffs on Monday, the company is also asking some staff to relocate. Those affected by this latest round of layoffs are mostly based in the US and Canada, according to TechCrunch, and represent about 1% of the company’s employees.
In the previous layoffs, Khosrowshahi said certain teams were oversized, which led to “overlapping work” and “mediocre results” and that his focus going forward is “lean, exceptionally high-performing teams, with clear mandates.”
On Monday, he said Uber’s leaders have been examining their teams over the past few months to make sure they are “structured for success.”
“This has resulted in difficult but necessary changes to ensure we have the right people in the right roles in the right locations,” Khosrowshahi said, “and that we’re always holding ourselves accountable to top performance.”
An Uber spokesman confirmed the layoffs but declined to comment further.
