Salesforce To Cut 1000 Jobs After Record Sales, Stock Surge

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) -- Salesforce plans to cut about 1,000 jobs, or less than 2% of its workforce, after it announced record-high sales of more than $5 billion. The announcement pushed the cloud computing company's stock to a new all-time high, Wednesday.

"In many ways this moment is very humbling and also very bittersweet, because we've seen so many of our customers go through so much difficulty this quarter," said CEO Marc Benioff in an interview with Bloomberg TV. "But I think that we can look at this quarter and look at everything that's happened with Salesforce and we so strongly believe that business is the greatest platform for change."

Benioff said it is reallocating resources to create more growth.

"This is actually not a sign that anything is wrong with Salesforce. In fact, just the opposite, salesforce is thriving as a company," said President of Joint Venture Silicon Valley Russell Hancock. "That company is going like gangbusters, the layoffs are simply because they're restructuring."

Hancock says Salesforce's success is emblematic of the gains enjoyed by tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon. Though Airbnb and Uber have made big job cuts, the industry has also fared better than others have because employees can work remotely.

"What happened after the pandemic is the difference is one between thriving and surviving, so we now actually have people whose jobs were utterly dependent on human interaction and those jobs are being eliminated," Hancock added.

Sales and customer support positions are among those cut at Salesforce, according to Bloomberg.

Salesforce said it will give the affected employees 60 days to search for a new job within the company. Employees can also work from home until at least next August due to the pandemic.