200 Googlers out the door as recession bites Google

"When companies grow that quickly it's almost impossible to get everything right"

27 March 2009 0:16 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Even Google, the internet darling and money making machine, isn't immune from the downturn the world is experiencing it seems as it moves to lay off almost 200 staff in its advertising and marketing departments.

"Google has grown very quickly in a very short period of time. When companies grow that quickly it's almost impossible to get everything right—and we certainly didn't", said Omid Kordestani, senior VP, Global Sales and Business Development on the company's official blog.

Blaming growth trends that never happened, Google has said that the only way to get into a better situation to tackle the recession is to restructure and therefore ditch staff excess to their new plan. That means 200 Googlers are now out the door looking for work.

"We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business", said Kordestani.

In January the latest set of results from the company suggested that the advertising search giant was mainly unaffected by the credit crunch with revenues up by 18% over the same quarter in 2007 and up 3% up on third quarter revenues in 2008. However net income was down 68% to $382 million compared to $1.2 billion a year ago after the company had to write down a $1 billion impairment charge related to Google’s ownership stakes in AOL and Clearwire.

On Wednesday Google informed investors that the top three Google bosses - CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin - took home just a $1 salary each last year.

"Eric, Larry and Sergey have voluntarily elected to receive only nominal cash compensation. Their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google", the company stated in its proxy statement to the SEC.

Full tags

Biz, Google