More than 400 workers of Uber have been given the pink slip as the company undertakes another major shakeup that will render 8 percent of its total global workforce jobless.
The affected personnel is from the engineering and product divisions of Uber, with a combined 335 staff being terminated, the company announced on Monday.
The layoffs will not affect its Eats unit, one of Uber's best-performing products, along with Freight, sources with knowledge of the situation, disclosed.
The ride-hailing giant cites almost 100 million subscribers of its app but has not been able to convert users into a sustainable profit and just last month bared that it suffered a three-month decline of $5.3 billion.
Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi said in an email that it is very crucial for the company to "get our edge back and push ourselves to do better." The email statement was first released by the New York Times.
Of those being terminated from work, over 80 percent are based in the United States; 11 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, and 6 percent in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, sources said.
All 435 of what the company considers is "non-essential personnel" follow the 400 marketing staff that Uber also let go in July. In a statement, Uber said that they hope these changes would "improve how the company works day to day."
Uber emphasized that these transformations include "ruthlessly prioritizing, and holding ourselves accountable to a high bar of agility."
The layoffs, based on a TechCrunch report, is in line with Uber's ending of a hiring freeze the company initiated last month. Apparently, efforts of a freeze have been lifted is proved by welcoming new workers instead of telling a hundred aging personnel to leave.
As a matter of fact, the company bared earlier that it is looking to hire 2,000 more staff for its Chicago office, but a big number of those new workers will be assigned at the company's Uber Freight trucking unit, which was said to have been spared from the ill-effects of today's retrenchment.
Uber initiated an IPO in May but has not been able to consistently make it big on Wall Street. The company's shares opened at $41.56 but have since dropped to $33.50 per share.
News of the terminations comes as California state regulators buckle down to vote on a bill referred to as 'AB5', that would mandate Uber and other ride-hailing firms to classify their drivers as regular employees instead of on-call service contractors.
