Google said it is cutting jobs at its cloud business unit as part of a reorganization aimed at improving operations at the business, Wall Street Journal reported.
Alphabet headcount grew by 20 percent in 2019, reflecting investment in key areas such as Cloud.
Total headcount at Alphabet rose 4,803 in Q4 2019 from the third quarter, and grew 20 percent over 2018.
The majority of new hires were engineers and product managers. In terms of product areas, the most sizable headcount increases were again in Google Cloud for both technical and sales roles.
Alphabet earlier said it expects the growth rate of headcount to be slightly higher in 2020, due to the impact of investment in priority areas, plus the decision to move certain vendor functions in-house, as well as from the planned impact of the Fitbit acquisition.
Google on Friday said a small number of employees have been notified their roles have been eliminated.
Google didn’t specify how many roles are being cut and said it was working with affected employees to find them new positions in the company.
“We recently communicated organizational changes to a handful of teams that will improve how we market, partner, and engage with customers in every industry around the globe,” a company spokesperson said in an email to CNBC on Friday.
The restructuring is primarily meant to realign focus on international markets and affects fewer than 50 employees. The company would not comment on how many employees are affected or which areas within the Cloud business would be affected, only saying it is working with internal “mobility teams” to find the employees new roles within the company.
Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud, this week outlined the company’s strategy, which included targeting five industries: retail, health care, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing.
Google’s cloud business generated $8.92 billion in revenue in fiscal 2019, compared with $5.84 billion in 2018.
Amazon Web Services, the main rival of Google Cloud, booked more than $35 billion in revenue last year.
Google Cloud, including GCP and G Suite, revenues were 2.6 billion for the fourth quarter, up 53 percent year-over-year, driven by significant growth at GCP and ongoing strong growth and G Suite. The growth rate of GCP was meaningfully higher than that of cloud overall.
Google Cloud said the number of deals over $50 million more than doubled.
