Meaning they expected to continue picking up speed, not maintain their speed
Large corporations are insane. Every small and medium company would wait to do layoffs until it threatened the business. Some even until after that point. Layoffs are awful.
Large corps, nah. Just lay people off if we get a little nervous!
Note, I don't think these corps are entitled to employ you. Absolutely not. I just think the corporate situation we got ourselves in is really nasty.
This is super idealized. How many layoffs have been going on in startup land recently?
Lots of small and medium sized companies, and I know for some that it was not their last move before going under.
We had a hiring boom driven by cheap money, which is now ending. Now we get the inverse.
Has nothing to do with insane large corps and saintly SMBs.
The link between actual business logic and company valuation broke down around 2010.
This is not to say that every single person being laid off is of low value, that’s not true. It’s just it is hard to lay off only low performers, some average or even good performer will always be collateral damage. But, overall, if you want well-performing companies to not do mass layoffs on recession, the only way is to make it more palatable to people to see mass firings in good times.
The quarterly revenue was about $27bn but net profit $4bn, so you're off by a factor of 7 or more on the estimate. R&D expenses alone are $9bn, and the largest operational expense is employee comp, by a LOT, distant second being data centers. For added measure, they also reduced real estate footprint along with the 11k employees.
The company has also essentially doubled in size every year since ~2013, and that was certainly encouraged by false positives in terms of future projections when the pandemic hit. So this is really not surprising, and a major cost-saving function for them.
Granted these are comparing annual cost versus quarterly figures, but the overall narrative still stands.
Are RSUs included into this number?
Did you short all these companies and are currently a billionaire? Since it took only half a brain to know.
It's just 2 years with 200k individual or 300k combined income, or 1M NAV.
A good thing to remember when you're tempted to sell short.
The problem with shorting is you can't just be right about the eventual direction... You have to be pretty bang on with the timing as well.
Therefore it's absolutely possible for people to suspect or have strong belief that something is unsustainable without having the liquidity or confidence on timing to take action on it.
No it's not to say there aren't Perma bears and other I told you so people crawling out of the woodwork, but that doesn't mean that every person who didn't capitalize on this is Monday-morning quarterbacking.
But in fact stores reopened and people went back to massively buy at stores instead of offline. Parenthesis is closed.
I mean people who had financial gain on the line (like yourselves) pretended this was the case so you could cash in at the time and then pull the rug once it wasn't working any more (as you're doing now), but everyone with half a brain knew it wasn't sustainable.
Literally how could that acceleration be permanent? With the insane exponential growth inflated by covid in 2020/2021, you'd have a few years before these big tech companies would have to be gaining more users than exist on earth.