Microsoft growth slowed to trickle even before today's layoff news |
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The latest employment figures from Microsoft show that the company dramatically slowed its pace of hiring around the world even before announcing layoffs earlier this morning. The company added a net total of only 164 people in December, a fraction of the monthly growth rate it was seeing just six months ago.
The company's total direct employment now stands at 95,828. That number is expected to decline by 2,000 to 3,000 people over the next 18 months as a result of today's layoff announcement. (Although Microsoft is cutting 5,000 jobs over that period, it's still planning to hire in some areas, making the net loss of jobs less than that amount.)
If the net loss is at the high end of that range, the company's employment would be 92,800 people in 18 months -- roughly where it was in July of last year. As we reported previously, Microsoft continued hiring in big numbers through the second and third calendar quarters of 2008, even as companies such as Google started to scale back.
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