Apple, “the last man standing” hasn’t announced any layoffs. Here’s why!

As the possibility of a recession grows, major technology companies are announcing layoffs. However, the layoffs follow a period of rapid growth. Just yesterday, Microsoft and Amazon announced massive layoffs: the former will affect 10,000 workers, or about 5% of the company, while the latter has already begun the process, which will ultimately affect 18,000 workers.

A number of other tech companies, including Alphabet and Meta, have recently reduced their workforce size, attributing their decision to the state of the economy as a whole and the prospect of a future recession. However, the rapidity with which these tech companies increased their headcount over the past two years, is often overlooked.

Due to widespread Covid lockdowns in the year 2020, internet applications gained in significance in people’s daily lives, which was a boon for the economies of many technology corporations. They hired hundreds more people in 2021 in the hopes that the rising sales and profits would become the new normal. Things didn’t pan out like that. Since growth has slowed, businesses have had to make adjustments.

But Apple stands out as an outlier, having neither significantly increased its hiring rate nor announced any layoffs in the past two years. To confirm this, a Bloomberg report revealed July last year that Apple was planning to slow hiring in 2023, making it the latest big tech company to shift its hiring plans. Analysis of the U.S SEC filings reveals the explosive expansion of some of the other tech “giants” during the pandemic.

Microsoft had 221,000 full-time employees in June 2022, the latest official figure. From 2021 to 2022, staff increased by 40,000, or 22%. Microsoft added 18,000 employees 11% the year before.

Amazon is more complex than Microsoft due to the fact that it employs a large number of hourly workers in its warehouses in addition to the typical corporate office staff found in technology companies.

But Amazon continued its voracious growth in 2021, adding 310,000 new jobs. After growing by over 38% and hiring half a million new workers in 2020, the company continued its rapid expansion in 2021. Amazon had 1.6 million employees in December 2021, 300,000 of whom were corporate.

Since going public in 2012, Meta has increased headcount by the thousands annually, as evidenced by SEC filings.

2020 saw the largest hiring period in Meta’s history, with over 13,000 new employees (30% growth). It hired an additional 13,000 people in 2021. These two years marked Facebook’s largest growth in terms of employee count during its brief existence.

Alphabet, formerly Google, has cut just 240 jobs at Verily, its health sciences division, and 40 at Intrinsic, its robotics division.

Alphabet’s recent layoffs, however, are much less severe than those of rival companies, despite the fact that its growth has been just as massive.

With a total of 156,500 employees, Alphabet grew by more than 21,000. This represents a 15% increase over the course of the year. Almost 14% more people were employed by the company in 2020, bringing the total to over 16,000.

This expansion, however, predates the pandemic, as Alphabet has increased staffing by at least 10% annually since 2013, and by over 20% in both 2018 and 2019.

in contrast, the growth of Apple slowed significantly during the pandemic. Employment at Apple has, in fact, trended in a similar direction every year since 2016.

There were 164,000 people working for Apple in September 2022 between the company’s headquarters and its retail outlets. However, that was still only 6.5% more than the same time in 2021, which equates to an actual increase of 10,000 workers. Similarly, Apple was selective in its hiring in 2020, adding fewer than 7,000 workers in the 12 months leading up to September 2021.

Apple was more strategic… It’s reason the company is the “last man standing”

An Insider report had revealed the company touted its “deliberate” decisions about investment and hiring. It’s the reason the company fired roughly 100 contract-based recruiters (not employees) with the aim of slowing the cadence of “hiring and spending,” in August last year.

Apple in a statement told Insider that it is continuing to hire, but because of the “current economic environment” it is “taking a very deliberate approach in some parts of the business.”

“We are very confident in Apple’s future and are investing for the long term. We want to be thoughtful and make smart decisions that enable us to continue fueling innovation for the long term,” said Apple.