(Presidentialwire.com)- After a period of rapid hiring, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager is cutting about 500 jobs, which amounts to less than 3 percent of the company’s workforce, Business Insider reported last Wednesday.
In recent years, the company, a leader on Wall Street, has been on a major hiring spree. By the end of FY2022, BlackRock had 19,900 employees, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A spokesman for the company told Reuters that the current layoffs amount to less than 3 percent of the company’s employees.
BlackRock hasn’t conducted a round of layoffs since 2019, instead increasing its workforce by about 22 percent over the last three years. The job cuts announced are due to an “unprecedented market environment,” a BlackRock spokesperson told MarketWatch.
The layoffs come a month after BlackRock CFO Gary Shedlin said the firm was reducing expenses and freezing most hiring due to short-term performance challenges.
On Friday, BlackRock reported an 18 percent drop in fourth-quarter profit as a global market rout squeezed fee income. However, the company registered $146 billion of long-term net inflows in the fourth quarter as stocks and bonds rebounded, according to Reuters.
Goldman Sachs also began laying off staff last Wednesday as part of a sweeping cost-cutting drive, according to Reuters.
In the previous week, Amazon announced that it was laying off about 18,000 employees. Salesforce, the tech company run by Marc Benioff, also announced it would cut about 10 percent of its roughly 73,000 workers.
While last year’s job growth has been touted as the second-best year in the country’s history, a growing number of companies have revealed plans to lay off workers in recent months.
US employers, led by tech and media companies, announced a total of 43,651 job cuts in December, a 129 percent increase from the same month in 2021.
