Uber- the ride-hailing company, stated on 29th July that it had cut around 400 jobs from its global marketing team. Uber is concerned over its slow growth and internal issues within the global marketing team, the Los Angeles Times published.
The company is also trying to reduce cost and enhance its operations due to its public debut and loss of $1 billion in the first quarter of 2019.
The laying off of employees was initially revealed by the New York Times. However, Uber did not instantly answer to a request for comment from Forbes.
Uber removed around 400 workers from its global marketing department, from 75 international offices, as per Uber. The marketing department had more than 1200 employees before the layoff, now reduced to 800. During the end of Q1, in March 2019, Uber claimed, it has 24,494 employees throughout the world.
Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi and head of marketing and public affairs, Jill Hazelbaker informed its employees on Monday that the marketing team will have a more enhanced structure, as per an internal email.
The newly structured marketing team will work under Mike Strickman’s leadership. Strickman will control the performance of the marketing team, analytics, and CRM. Uber, in the previous month, recruited a former employee of TripAdvisor to the vice president post of performance marketing and one more candidate will be recruited for the global marketing head. The global marketing head will control the heads of various operations such as product marketing, Eats, brand, research, creative, planning, and B2B.
Uber went public in May 2019, and the layoffs are the recent cost-driven changes to happen in the company.
Back in June, Barney Harford –the chief operating officer and Rebecca Messina- the chief marketing officer resigned as a part of a restructuring, just after Uber went public. Uber also merged its public relations, marketing and policy within the communication executive, Jill Hazelbaker.
As per the internal email copy, Hazelbaker looked over the marketing department.
Khosrowshahi responded to the restructuring, saying the objective of this is to place the marketing team and the company in the right direction.
Khosrowshahi mentioned, “Today, there’s a general sense that while we’ve grown fast, we’ve slowed down. You can see it in Pulse Survey feedback and All Hands questions, and you can feel it in much of our day-to-day work. This happens naturally as companies get bigger, but it is something we need to address and quickly.”
The first quarterly report of Uber gave a view of its scaling business with shocking operational losses. Revenue of Uber in 2018 was 2.5 billion, and in 2019, in the same period, the revenue is 3.1 billion, increased by 20 percent in comparison to the previous year. The gross bookings of Uber grew by 35 percent to 14.6 billion, in its first-quarter- Uber Eats is noticing most of the growth. However, the operational loss incurred by Uber is $1 billion in Q1 of 2019.
Uber is expected to release the Q2 earnings in the coming week.
Khosrowshahi described in an email to workers that the structuring was driven by his decision to directly manage significant parts of the business. He informed workers that he seeks to involve more in the daily operations of Uber, the important platform of Uber, namely Rides and Eats and has considered they should directly consult to him.
