Tech job cuts slow in 2024; retailers end year on strong note

Global job cuts in the technology sector declined in 2024 from the prior year in a sign that the industry may have endured the worst of the reductions that led companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook parent Meta to shed millions of square feet of office space and other property.

Seattle-based Amazon, Meta and other tech giants announced progress during recent quarterly earnings presentations on their restructuring and cost-cutting plans amid falling interest rates and signs of improvement in the broader economy.

Just over 540 tech companies shed nearly 151,484 workers in 2024, compared with workforce reductions by just under 2,000 businesses that totaled 264,220 jobs in 2023, the highest number of tech cuts since the year before the onset of the pandemic, according to data from tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi as of Dec. 31.

Semiconductor giant Intel announced in August that it would cut 15,000 jobs, roughly 15% of its global workforce, as part of a plan to reduce costs by $10 billion in 2025. Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla in April terminated 15,000 workers, mostly in Texas and California, as part of billionaire founder Elon Musk’s plan to cut costs amid falling EV sales.

Other companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Salesforce and Riot Games also announced job cuts this year.

However, executives for Menlo Park, California-based Meta in August said they expected to end this year "with in-seat reported headcount that is meaningfully higher than where we ended 2023" as the company pivots to hiring growth after two years of trimming its workforce and its office space.

Meta cut a third of its workforce in 2023 in what Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg dubbed a "year of efficiency."

Retail sales activity picked up in December as the outlook for future business conditions improved, according to two industry reports tracked closely by analysts.

The weekly Johnson Redbook Index increased to 7.1% for the week that ended Dec. 28, up from 5.9% for the same period last year. The index measures the same-store sales growth of large general merchandise retailers representing about 9,000 stores in the United States.

The index, published since 1964 by Redbook Research, represents over 80% by dollar value of the total retail sales data collected by the U.S. Commerce Department, making the report a proxy for overall retail sales activity in the country. The Redbook index averaged 3.66% from 2005 until 2024, reaching an all-time high of 21.9% in November of 2021 after rebounding from a record low in the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020.

Meanwhile, the monthly Texas retail sales index, a survey of retail activity in the Lone Star State, jumped 13 points to 17.3 in December. The latest reading is the highest in the state since late 2021, according to the Texas Retail Outlook Survey based on input from industry executives collected by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Both the future employment and future capital expenditures sub-indices of the retail index remained in positive territory in December, suggesting that executives believe retail activity will keep improving over the next six months, according to the Texas survey.