Uber Technologies is cutting about 3,300 roles, or 10 per cent of its staff worldwide, in a vast restructuring aimed at reducing layers of management and reallocating spending within its ride-sharing, delivery and robotaxi businesses.
Chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi announced the changes in an email obtained by Bloomberg News, saying Uber’s growth in recent years has created “more layers, more co-ordination, more fragmented ownership and, in some cases, structures that made sense when businesses were smaller but no longer serve us well at our current scale”.
The cuts will reduce the number of managers in the company by 20 per cent, with some being moved to the role of individual contributor, an Uber representative said. The company did not disclose what percentage of managers would be laid off, however. The cuts also apply to people who are not managers.
To make Uber “simpler and faster”, it is reducing the number of “micro-teams” with one or two members by about 50 per cent and paring back the number of employees who sit more than seven layers down from the chief executive, Mr Khosrowshahi said. The company is also streamlining its core engineering, science and delivery groups, including combining its three operations teams for restaurants, retail and white-label delivery service.
Shares of Uber erased earlier losses to rise as much as 1.7 per cent in premarket trading after the announcement.
And as part of an ongoing push to ask more staff to work in-person at key offices, Uber is also mandating that only about 1 per cent of employees can work remotely from now on.
Mr Khosrowshahi said the changes will “generate savings that we intend to reinvest in growth, innovation, and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years”. He said more investment will be made in drivers, couriers and merchants around the world, in addition to upgrading Uber's core business and working to build an “autonomous future”.
The move comes as Uber has vowed to commit more than $10 billion to robotaxi partnerships in the coming years, as it seeks to transform its service into the go-to platform for hailing an autonomous vehicle. The company has reallocated capital in other ways in the past year, including by reducing its stakes in some companies and investing in Avride, Lucid Group, Nuro and Rivian Automotive.
The layoffs follow more targeted cuts the ride-hailing company made across its customer service and human resources departments earlier in the year.
Unlike Big Tech firms, which have conducted frequent job cuts in the name of heavy spending on artificial intelligence in the past few years, Uber had avoided vast reductions since the Covid-19 pandemic. It said in May it would moderate the pace of hiring. Wednesday’s cuts bring Uber’s overall employee count to fewer 30,000 people, similar to the figure in 2021.
Mr Khosrowshahi did not mention the impact of AI in his announcement but the changes are also driven by a desire to use more of the technology to drive daily operations.
