Zoom Video Communications Inc (NASDAQ:ZM) chief executive Eric Yuan will forego almost his entire salary as the firm moves to lay of 1,300 staff.
Yuan will cut his salary by 98% and not take a bonus, suggesting in a statement he was accountable for the mistakes which have led to the company cutting 15% of its workforce, while other executives will take a 20% reduction.
“I want to show accountability not just in words but in my own actions,” he said.
The cuts were made as Zoom’s pandemic-driven boom died down after the site became a household name to those working and meeting online.
“We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyse our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably,” he commented, with Zoom having trebled in size in just over a year as the Covid-19 virus hit.
“The uncertainty of the global economy, and its effect on our customers, means we need to take a hard – yet important – look inward to reset ourselves,” he added.
Zoom reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth since it was founded in 2011 last August, subsequently cutting revenue forecasts for two quarters in a row as business slowed.
Between January and October 2020 its share price skyrocketed over 720% to US$559, as the use of online video-calling platforms became commonplace, but the stock has since fallen to US$82.5.
Zoom now joins hundreds of other tech companies in cutting their workforces, with almost 100,000 staff across the industry this year compared to almost 160,000 in the whole of 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, including Amazon, Microsoft and Dell most recently.