Big Tech woes lead to layoffs, resulting in stock surge

Over recent months, Silicon Valley has been struggling to keep its position as an endlessly burgeoning region of massive profits and possibilities.

Technology stocks listed on NASDAQ have been decreasing in value, making the chart pattern for the NASDAQ Composite Index quite sobering reading.

Indeed, so severely have the tables turned on Silicon Valley's 'big tech' giants that European stock markets, with their legacy companies which have been in establishment for in some cases hundreds of years, have been outperforming the giants of the electronic revolution for many months.

Something had to give, and yesterday some of the most popularly traded companies in North America's big tech sector began to announce significant redundancies of staff.

Following last week's well publicized redundancies at Alphabet, Google's holding company, there have been more wounded tech firms following suit.

The layoffs at Google actually had a positive effect on stock values, and now other firms in a similar position are announcing their intention to go down a similar path.

Swedish music streaming service Spotify witnessed its shares rally yesteda as it announced its plan to cut hundreds of jobs to help rein in costs.

Shares of Alphabet rocketed at the end of last week, jumping 5% and adding more than $50 billion in market value, following the tech giant’s decision to lay off 12,000 workers on Friday, demonstrating that it had overspent and grown its business to rapidly since the 'e-commerce revolution' which took place in 2020 when many Western governments locked their populations down.

This appears to be a proven strategy, as those with a keen eye who have been monitoring the performance of Meta (previously known as Facebook) will have noticed that its shares have skyrocketed about 50% since the firm announced in November it would cut more than 11,000 jobs.

Silicon Valley was notoriously bloated, and many highly paid staff were allegedly sitting in vacation homes and refusing to come to the office during 2021. The tables are now turning, and the need to keep shareholders happy appears to be paramount at last.

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