Mark Zuckerberg

Yuan Platform Company Yuan Its company-wide layoffs will be reportedly launched next week. The move is because the company is also accelerating the recruitment of machine learning engineers.

what happened: Meta has notified employees of upcoming layoffs on Friday, according to an internal memorandum reviewed by Reuters.

According to the company, affected employees in most countries, including the U.S., will be notified starting at 5 a.m. Monday. However, due to local labor laws, staff in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands will not be affected.

Meanwhile, between February 11 and February 18, employees in more than a dozen countries in Europe, Asia and Africa will be notified.

Meta did not immediately respond to Benzinga’s request for comment.

See also: Wall Street is on tariff threat, dollar rises, Uber rocket films on Ackman’s tweets fall: What is the driving market on Friday?

In January, META confirmed plans to cut plans for at least some of the “lowest performers” by about 5%. Meta’s head Janelle Gale described the layoffs as “performance termination.” She also clarified that the cuts would not result in office closures or any further updates to the decision.

Meta is also accelerating the hiring process for machine learning engineers and other “critical business” engineering roles. According to another memo from Peng Fan, the vice president of monetization engineering, the hiring drive will be between February 11 and March 13.

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Why it matters: The upcoming layoffs and accelerated hiring of machine learning engineers are in a series of strategic moves by Meta.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg Recently visited the White House to cooperate with the Trump administration in advancing U.S. technical leadership abroad. This is seen as a position to Meta in the global technology field.

However, Meta’s AI stance has always been a topic of concern. The company’s AI model is considered to be a model of “clearly lagging behind” Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.

“In terms of the techniques and methods used by DeepSeek, leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have fully understood this approach and have also adopted these approaches, but obviously not the case with Meta,” Piper Sandler’s analyst notes read.

Despite these challenges, META’s stock has performed well, with stocks growing 52% over the past year, up 19% from the year and 15% last month. However, Zuckerberg sold millions of dollars in stock.

Price action: According to ratings from 43 analysts tracked by Benzinga, Meta’s consensus target is $724.86. The latest ratings released by UBS, Citigroup and Oppenheimer on January 30, 2025 show that the average price target is higher than $788.67. This suggests that the potential upside potential for metadata is 10.47%, based on these latest assessments.

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Disclaimer: The content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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