Google Taiwan is reducing its workforce in the local market after Alphabet Inc, the parent company of the US search engine, announced in January that it would lay off 6 percent of its employees globally, as the international tech industry faces market uncertainty.
Google Taiwan began downsizing its local workforce on Wednesday, and more than 180 workers in the country would be affected, Chinese-language media reported.
Google Taiwan would remain in line with its global workforce reduction plan, and operations in Taiwan would make corresponding adjustments that would abide by local labor regulations, the company said in a statement on Friday.
Photo: REUTERS
The company would provide as much assistance as possible to the affected employees, including extended employee benefits and other support programs, it said.
Google operations in the Asia-Pacific region had completed workforce reductions by the end of last month, it said.
Taiwan is Google’s largest hardware research and development base outside the company’s US headquarters.
In 2018, Google spent US$1.1 billion to acquire Taiwan-based smartphone brand HTC Inc’s ODM manufacturing assets, which had rolled out the Pixel line for the US client.
In addition to passing the hardware assets to Google, HTC transferred 2,000 of its engineers to work for the US tech giant, significantly boosting its workforce in Taiwan.
The team had continued developing the Pixel for Google, and Google Taiwan continued hiring over the past two years.
In January, Alphabet chief executive officer Sundar Pichai — who announced the global downsizing — said that over the past two years Google had seen dramatic growth, and it had been hiring “for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”
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