Meta plans new layoffs that could match last year’s

Meta cut about 11,000 jobs, or about 13% of its employees, last year. This year’s cuts are expected to reach the same proportion of those remaining, the people said, although the final tally of expected cumulative cuts in the second quarter is still unclear.

Among the projects that will be cut are some wearables that were in the works at Reality Labs, the hardware and metaverse division of Meta, the people said, suggesting a short-term withdrawal from efforts to popularize virtual and augmented reality products, even as longer-term research. efforts continue.

Meta shares rose more than 2% in after-hours trading after the Wall Street Journal announced the planned cuts.

“We continue to look across the business, both in the app family and in the reality labs, and really assess whether we are deploying our resources to the highest leverage opportunities,” said Susan Li, CFO of Meta, at the Morgan Stanley 2023 Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. “It’s going to force us to make tough decisions to end projects in certain places, to divert resources from certain teams.”

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg previously said that 2023 would be a “year of efficiency” at Meta and that some projects would likely be halted at the company.

The continued cuts are notable given Mr. Zuckerberg’s prediction in October that the company would end 2023 with about as many employees as it had at the time. The company laid off 13% of its staff the following month, then sought to encourage further attrition through the performance review process.

Tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc.,

Microsoft Corp.

and others have cut thousands of jobs this year and are lasting as profits retreat from pandemic-induced highs. Since 2022, the number of layoffs has reached nearly 300,000 workers, according to Layoffs.fyi, a site that tracks job cuts in the industry. Overall, employment in the information industry remained unchanged between July and January, according to federal data. Total employment increased during this period.

Last year’s cuts marked Meta’s first major restructuring in its history, as it grappled with plummeting digital ad sales and a plummeting share price. The layoffs followed a pandemic-era hiring spree that nearly doubled the company’s workforce to more than 87,000 from the end of 2019 to last September.

Last month, the company reported improving conditions in its underlying business and said it would repurchase an additional $40 billion of shares, helping to rejuvenate investor sentiment.

Meta’s stock has rebounded strongly, more than doubling from last year’s low point in November, although it is still well below its all-time high of over $384 in September 2021.

On Thursday, the company announced internally that it was closing its new product experimentation group. This unit was created in 2019 with the aim of creating new consumer-oriented applications. In an internal post announcing the decision to end NPE, Meta’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote that the company now has “NPE-like organizations housed directly within our product teams.”

The shutdown was a notable reversal for a rapidly growing team led by Ime Archibong, a highly regarded leader within the company and its most senior black product manager. An internal announcement said Mr. Archibong would become the product manager for Messenger, the company’s messaging app. What will happen to his staff remains an open question, with Mr Cox writing that Mr Archibong would work with his team to integrate staff members ‘into existing workflows across the business wherever we can’ .

Besides closing projects, the company is also streamlining management layers and bringing together teams that focus on the same type of work under one leader. That includes Meta’s marketing and integrity teams, Meta COO Javier Olivan said at the Morgan Stanley conference.

“Then you can just move resources around much faster,” Olivan said. “It just makes you more efficient.”

Bloomberg News earlier reported that Meta was planning another round of layoffs.

Meta will also move many of its offices to so-called shared offices in the coming weeks. Hot desks are office setups where employees use shared workspaces rather than permanently assigned desks or desks, according to people familiar with the matter.

For laid-off employees, severance pay is expected to be about the same as that offered to those who were laid off in November, according to a person familiar with the matter. The package – a minimum of four months’ salary plus seniority-based overtime – was among the most substantial offered in the tech industry’s recent layoffs. In recent days, Meta has worked to set up what is internally referred to as an “Alumni Portal,” a website intended to streamline benefits questions and documents.

Write to Jeff Horwitz at jeff.horwitz@wsj.com, Salvador Rodriguez at salvador.rodriguez@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com and Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com