The list of digital players facing layoffs is getting longer. The German group Zalando announced the launch of “a program to reduce several hundred positions within the teams”, in a letter to its employees, Tuesday, February 21. Zalando, an online fashion accessories retailer headquartered in Berlin, employs 17,000 people worldwide.
“The macroeconomic environment has become more complicated,” detailed the company’s two CEOs and founders, Robert Gentz and David Schneider, in this text. “Some parts of our business have grown too fast,” they added. Since its founding in 2008, the start-up Zalando has become one of the leading European groups in the online sale of clothing, claiming more than 50 million active customers.
The job cuts are expected to affect “many divisions of Zalando, including senior management levels,” the executives explained. On the other hand, employees in “logistics centers, customer service and in stores” will not be affected. So do Zalando Studio’s “operational posts”, which produce photos of items sold online.
Further details of the plan will only be known after “consultation” with employee representatives by management, which has already begun, they said.
This announcement comes as social plans are multiplying in the digital sector, all over the world. The tech sector is facing a difficult economic environment in the context of high inflation and rising interest rates after a good period, in particular at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and the confinements which benefited the sale on the Internet.
After layoffs at Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, Google in turn announced 12,000 job cuts in January, or just over 6% of its workforce. In Germany, the software giant SAP will cut 3,000 jobs.
