Indication emerged yesterday that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, will reduce its office space in Lagos after global layoffs in mid-2023 affected its Nigerian team.
While the number of workforce that may be affected by this shrinking of Lagos office is yet unknown, Meta, in a statement made available to The Guardian yesterday, said: “We’re making focused, balanced investments to support our most strategic long-term priorities, and are firmly committed to Nigeria.
“We regularly review our office spaces to ensure they suit the needs of the business, and the office in Nigeria is no different as outlined by Mark in late 2022 when referencing company cuts.
“As we shrink our real estate footprint, we’re transitioning to desk sharing for people, who already spend most of their time outside the office”
This development is coming barely six weeks after The Guardian broke the news about Microsoft shutting down its innovation centre, the ADC in Nigeria. The ADC employed about 200 Nigerians, especially engineers.
As regards Meta, it will be recalled that in the 2023 layoffs, some 35 people were affected by the layoffs. The company’s engineering team, which had 24 employees according to a 2022 report, was laid off.
According to Meta, “engineers continue to serve the region from a number of our global engineering hubs outside of Nigeria.”
In a message of November 9, 2022 as regards layoffs, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had explained how the challenge unfolded.
He said: “At the start of COVID, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.
“In this new environment, we need to become more capital efficient. We’ve shifted more of our resources onto a smaller number of high priority growth areas — like our AI discovery engine, our ads and business platforms, and our long-term vision for the metaverse.
We’ve cut costs across our business, including scaling back budgets, reducing perks, and shrinking our real estate footprint. We’re restructuring teams to increase our efficiency. But these measures alone won’t bring our expenses in line with our revenue growth, so I’ve also made the hard decision to let people go.”
