Waze Reportedly Lays Off 5% of Workforce, Closes Offices in Latin America

By Dana Cruz Sep 10 2020, 03:01 AM EDT

Waze will layoff more than five percent of its global workforce and close some of its Latin America offices, said the company's CEO Noam Bardin.

Waze only has 555 employees on its total global workforce and the layoff means about 30 people will be off its workforce, said The Verge.

Other than the layoff, Waze is also considering to close some of its offices in the Asia-Pacific and Latin American offices. They said it was part of their plan to refocus business on certain markets.

The company claimed that the layoff was partly due to the coronavirus pandemic. Roadways have been emptied all over the world and many cities went into lockdown.

Many people have also started working from home as part of the new norm and stopped using Waze for their daily navigation needs.

Closures will take place in sales offices in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.

Waze has yet to respond to news outlets' requests for comments.

Fewer Users, Fewer Advertising

Fewer Waze users meant the company also received less advertising revenues. Bardin told Business Insider that there was a "significant drop" in trips taken via its carpool service.

"This has forced us to rethink priorities," said Bardin. He said the app will instead focus its resources to improve products, invest in technical infrastructure and refocus on a small number of "high-value" countries.

Layoffs will take place across Waze's ad sales, partnerships and marketing teams, said reports.

Bardin assured that employees being laid off will be "taken care of [financially]" until early 2021. The workers will also receive year-end bonuses and continued healthcare benefits as possible.

Waze knew laying off people during the pandemic can be cruel. With this knowledge, they will also offered assistance in finding jobs either at its parent company Google or elsewhere.

Waze was acquired by Google in 2013 for about $1.1 billion, reports claim. Recently, it saw a dip in both monthly active users and number of customers each month.

In an April blog post, the company said miles driven went down 60 percent globally. Italy was one of its most hurt markets as it saw the biggest drop at 90 percent.

The number of U.S. users also went down by about 60 percent since March, when lockdowns started getting put in place.

Waze Carpool Struggles Amid COVID-19

Waze Carpool, its two-year-old ride-share service also suffered from the pandemic. With work from home setups, fewer people used the app to share rides with co-workers and neighbors.

People who typically go to work along the same route also had to travel separately due to social distancing measures. Waze said it will shrink the number of people working on Waze Carpool.

A spokesperson said the app was supposed to reach 1 million monthly carpool trips if COVID-19 not struck the world. Now, the company is "no where near that."

While many social media apps thrived amid the pandemic, travel and carpooling apps saw downward trends. Uber and Lyft also had to lay off workers during the pandemic.