American multinational corporation and technology company Apple, has reportedly announced plans to cut more than 600 jobs after it abandoned its electric vehicle (EV) project.
According to a filing report with the state of California titled “Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification”, 614 employees were notified in March that they would lose their jobs, effective May 27, 2024.
Part of the filing reads,
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“WARN protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring employers to give a 60-day notice to the affected employees and both state and local representatives before a plant closing or mass layoff. Advance notice provides employees and their families time to transition and adjust to the potential loss of employment, time to seek alternative jobs and, if necessary, time to obtain skills training or retraining to successfully compete in the job market.”
The recent job cuts at Apple is coming after the company had avoided mass layoffs in recent years, unlike other firms which have cut hundreds of thousands of jobs since the pandemic. Recall that in May last year, Apple’s boss Tim Cook told CNBC that layoffs would be a last resort.
Although the filing did not specify which projects the laid-off employees were working on, Bloomberg reports that most of the affected employees were working at buildings related to its canceled car projects, while others were working at a facility for its next-generation screen development.
The filing comes weeks after Apple canceled a long running project to build an electric vehicles in a team called the special projects group. In a decision that stunned both employees and industry observers, Apple Inc. announced the termination of its decade-long pursuit to develop an electric car, a project dubbed Project Titan, signaling the end of one of the company’s most ambitious endeavors to date.
Reports of Apple’s ambition to build a car first surfaced in 2014 after the company recruited automotive engineers and other talent from auto companies. While there was little public information about Apple’s plans, the company operated a program with autonomous Apple-owned cars equipped with sensors and safety drivers cruising around the San Francisco Bay/Area.
Apple’s car project was part of an internal effort to look for technologies the company could develop with huge potential markets, as some of its smartphone rivals have also invested heavily in car manufacturing.
For instance, Xiaomi, the third-largest seller of smartphones worldwide in February, unveiled its long-awaited electric vehicle, as it bets big on sales, targeting 20 million users.
Apple’s decision to abandon the project comes at a time when major automakers are reevaluating their investments in electric vehicles, and amid increased scrutiny on autonomous vehicle projects.
The Cupertino giant entry into the automotive industry was also seen as a possible boon to its bottorn line, giving it a new source of revenue to help bolster agajrist stagnating hardware sales and regulatory threats to its services business.
In a brutal quarter for the tech industry, Apple has just become the latest company to carry out layoffs. More than 600 employees in California are being affected by the tech giant’s first major cut since the pandemic, according to state filings. A number of the affected workers appear to have been assigned to the recently nixed Apple screen and car projects, Bloomberg reports. Many tech companies have been slashing their workforces after going on hiring sprees during the pandemic; earlier this week, Amazon announced hundreds of cuts in its cloud computing division.