Apple implements several cost-cutting measures: Avoids major job cuts

In his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman talks about a number of measures Apple has taken to save costs and resources in order to avoid mass layoffs during the economic downturn.

Here are the strategies Apple has implemented so far:

• Apple has delayed the payment of bonuses to teams within the company until October, to coincide with the payment of bonuses to other colleagues. This will allow the company to keep the money for the time being.
• Some special projects, such as the new HomePod with screen, have been postponed until early next year. This allows Apple to allocate its R&D budget to more urgent projects.
  Apple is cutting budgets across teams and asking senior vice presidents to approve more things.
• For some teams, hiring has been suspended altogether, while others have been severely curtailed.
• When people leave positions, Apple generally does not fill them.
• In some cases, Apple has limited the ability of employees (both corporate and retail) to move to other departments or stores, usually at a cost.
• Over the past year, Apple has laid off many contract workers and more recently has quietly reduced the number of contract workers in its engineering team and other departments.
  Field service budgets have been significantly reduced and now require senior management approval. For some departments, field work will be suspended altogether for some time, except for business-critical reasons.
• Management has tightened office 'attendance' requirements and some employees deemed to be non-compliant may be dismissed.
• On the retail side, Apple's close monitoring of attendance and working hours has raised some concerns. Some employees are worried that they could be fired for not working a certain number of hours, and believe that Apple is taking stricter measures to get employees to quit on their own to save the company money.
• Retail employees have said that when someone takes time off for illness or other reasons, Apple sometimes does not give them extra hours to make up for it. At the same time, the company has eliminated the "special sick leave" system that was created as a result of the New Crown epidemic, which required employees to use their normal sick leave or not be paid.
• Some retail workers said that when someone leaves, Apple does not always find a replacement immediately. In addition, some employees noted that terminations for normal reasons seemed to be on the rise.
• As for whether Apple really doesn't need to cut jobs, Mark Gurman says it's hard to say. The world has changed so much in the last three years, who knows what the future holds?