On Wednesday, Match Group Inc joined a growing string of U.S. companies that are snipping jobs to rein in costs after it announced plans to lay off about 8 per cent of its workforce, or about 200 employees, as spending on its dating apps slows.
Source: The Crypto Times
The company gave a lackluster quarterly revenue estimate a day before that it blamed on a leaning economic slowdown, a strong dollar and “significant” poor product execution at Tinder. Product delays have also hit its Hinge app at a time when competition is rising from rival Bumble Inc.
In an email, the company said that the job cuts were mainly in areas such as recruiting. The cuts have already taken place in the United States and are now being carried out in other parts of the world.
Match had to bear an expense of about $3 million in severance and similar costs during the fourth quarter and said it was expecting additional costs of about $6 million this year. The parent company said the moves would help improve margins in the second half of the year.
Shares of Texas-based Match plummeted by 7.7%.
The layoffs come as other tech firms from Microsoft Corp to Amazon. com Inc shed tens of thousands of jobs to brace for a possible recession.
CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino said, “In addition to the cuts, we expect Match to place greater emphasis on marketing its Tinder and Hinge brands, core areas of growth for 2023.”
Match, which has majorly depended on word-of-mouth advertising, said Tinder will be introducing its first global marketing campaign in the current quarter to improve brand perception.
According to Refinitiv data, it estimates first-quarter revenue between $790 million and $800 million, lesser than analysts’ estimates of $817.3 million. The company also reported its first-ever quarterly revenue decline.
The company employed about 2,500 full time and 40 part-time employees as of the end of 2021, as per regulatory filings. Tinder is an online dating and geosocial networking application. In Tinder, users “swipe right” to like or “swipe left” to dislike the profiles of other users. Their account includes their photos, a short bio, and a list of their interests.
Tinder was launched by Sean Rad at a hackathon held at the Hatch Labs incubator in West Hollywood in 2012. By 2014, Tinder was registering about one billion daily “swipes” and reported that users logged into the app on average 11 times a day.