Xerox announced that it will be laying off a part of its workforce as it tries to reinvent the company amid slowing revenue. Shares of the digital printing company closed down more than 12 percent following the Jan. 3 announcement.
Xerox is pursuing a new “business unit operating model” under which the corporation is “targeting a 15 percent workforce reduction” in the current quarter, the Norwalk, Connecticut-based firm said in a statement. “Proposed reductions will be subject to formal consultation with local works councils and employee representative bodies where applicable. Xerox is committed to providing transition support for affected employees.”
Xerox employs roughly 20,500 workers worldwide; a 15 percent reduction will likely affect more than 3,000 employees.
As part of the new operating model, the company announced three key “reinvention” priorities: core print business, global business services, and IT and digital services arms. A new executive leadership team was also announced.
“The shift to a business unit operating model is a continuation of our client-focused, balanced execution priorities and is designed to accelerate product and services, go-to-market, and corporate functions’ operating efficiencies across all geographies we serve,” Xerox CEO Steven Bandrowczak said.
The layoffs come as Xerox has seen revenue tumble over the years. Its third-quarter 2023 revenue was $1.65 billion—a far cry from the same period in 2015, when it netted $4.33 billion.
The company’s share price has been on a steady decline. Since November 2019 when the share price hit a peak of $33.48, Xerox shares have since fallen by more than 52 percent.
Xerox’s employee layoff is one of the most prominent tech sector job cuts announced in 2024.
According to data from Layoffs.fyi, more than 262,000 employees were laid off by 1,183 tech firms in 2023. In comparison, close to 165,000 were laid off in 2022. Big tech firms such as Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft each let go of thousands of employees.
Various factors have been cited for the mass layoffs last year, including companies’ facing significant pressure to boost their profitability, slowing sales, and a decline in stock price.
The tech layoffs are a trend that happens “every 10 years or so in big or small chunks depending on that decade’s economical precursors,” according to Elham Assadi, chief visionary officer at HR consultancy Sedaa, in San Ramon, California, told The Epoch Times last year. The pattern of layoffs remains the same, she added.
Layoffs in 2024
It isn’t just the tech sector that has seen mass layoffs in 2023. Big Tech led in terms of layoffs last year as of November, followed by the retail industry, health care/products sector, financial firms, warehousing, and media, according to a report by career transition specialists Challenger, Gray, and Christmas Inc.“Companies are expecting slower growth in the coming months, particularly in industries that support consumers. Meanwhile, health care has seen tremendous turmoil since the pandemic, as hospital systems look to cut costs without cutting care,” the report says.
By November, companies had announced plans for hiring only 777,101 employees, which the report pointed out was the lowest hiring plan since 2015.
In a Jan. 3 report, financial services firm Morningstar said it expects the job market slowdown to continue into 2024.
The current wave of layoffs had kicked off at the beginning of 2022. It “paused temporarily” by the latter half of 2023 on the back of strong GDP growth. However, “slowing GDP growth in 2024 will compel firms to slow hiring in order to avoid deteriorating profits,” it said.
“Firms have already started to cut down on hours per worker, which declined by more than 0.6 percent year over year in the first six months of 2023. We expect the cutting of hours to serve as a precursor to a slower pace of total job gains.”
Another major factor affecting employment numbers is artificial intelligence. According to a survey conducted by Resume Builder in February last year, half of the 1,000 surveyed U.S. companies were using the AI platform ChatGPT.
Since November 2022, 1 in every 2 companies replaced workers with ChatGPT. Sixty-three percent of business leaders said that ChatGPT will “definitely” or “probably” lead to workers being laid off within five years.
Resume Builder chief career adviser Stacie Haller said that there is a “lot of excitement” about using ChatGPT.
“In talent acquisition, the more mundane tasks like writing job descriptions, interview questions, and following up with candidates are already being replaced by ChatGPT. Writing code is another area where this technology can provide output, while employees focus on more strategic initiatives,” she said.
“Since this new technology is just ramping up in the workplace, workers need to surely be thinking of how it may affect the responsibilities of their current job ... The results of this survey show that employers are looking to streamline some job responsibilities using ChatGPT.”
