Transcript
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Foreign.
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Layoffs because of AI seem to keep coming. This is Motley Fool Money.
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Welcome to Motley Fool Money.
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I'm Tyler Crow and today I'm joined by longtime fool contributors Matt Frankel and John Quast. It's a bit of a smorgasbord of a show today. We're going to look at the math behind the release of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and a little bit of the update on the oil situation in the markets. Right now we're going to do a quick check on retail company Dollar General. But first we want to take a look at Atlassian. Earlier today the company made a decision that they were going to have a rather large round of layoffs. As we're taping, shares are up about 0.4%. So not really much of a huge market reaction. Almost like a yeah, we were expect. John, you dug into the numbers for us. Kind of give us a brief rundown of what Atlassian is planning and what were your like knee jerk reactions to the decision.
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I think most of the time this wouldn't be considered a large layoff necessarily roughly 10% of the workforce. But for Atlassian, this is a massive shift in how it has talked about its employee workforce in the past. I just want to do a little bit of basically go back in time. If you look at the headcount for atlassian back at June 30, 2021, the reason I'm choosing June 30 is because its fiscal year is a little bit wonky. That's the end of its fiscal 2021 it had just over 6,400 workers. By the end of the next fiscal year it had over 8,800 workers. That's an increase of 37% in a single year. This was at a time when tech companies were laying off, right? This is coming out of the pandemic. A lot of these companies saying hey we over hired now, we need to right size. And in the 2023 letter to shareholders, Atlassian's management said tech's labor market is such right now that we're able to hire amazing talent who might not otherwise be available. Essentially what they were saying is as these other companies lay off, we are picking up this quality hires that we wouldn't be able to pick up otherwise. And it's kept that in ethos in its company, if you will, of hiring, hiring, hiring. The second quarter of last year, 12,750 workers. Now the second quarter of this year that it just reported over 14,600 workers. That's another 15% increase in a single year, nearly 1900 hires in the past year. Now they just release a letter saying hey, we're going to let go 1600 workers, which is fewer than what they've hired in the past year. But it says we're doing this to self fund further investments in AI and enterprise sales. But just so interesting that it's a massive, I'd say, reversal of what its hiring policy has historically been.
