Oracle reportedly plans to lay off thousands of employees

Yahoo Finance reporter Dan Howley looks at how tech company Oracle's stock is moving to the downside amid reports that it's starting to lay off thousands of U.S. employees.

Video transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: All right, well, shifting gears here, looking at shares of Oracle, as you can see, trading in the red, down just over 1/2 a percent there, following a report that the tech giant has started to lay off US-based employees. Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley is here with more on this. So, Dan, what can you tell us?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, this is a report coming from the Information saying that Oracle could lay off thousands of employees based in the US and in Europe. They would mostly hit marketing positions for software and customer service. So that's one of the newest kind of tech companies that we are now hearing are either laying off employees or slowing down hiring. Obviously, this is one of the largest moves, if it does happen to be thousands of employees.

But we've heard that tech companies ranging from Apple and Microsoft to Amazon and Nvidia are either slowing hiring or stopping hiring entirely. So this isn't necessarily unprecedented, but it is the size. And just to kind of discuss what happened in Q4 for Oracle, they actually beat analysts' estimates on earnings per share and revenue. And they had seen their cloud division jump 36% in revenue-- excuse me, 19% in revenue for that quarter. So they did have a decent Q4, but now, obviously, we're hearing these reports about layoffs. And we'll see what kind of restructuring that kind of does for the company itself.

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Tough to hear those layoffs and those hiring freezes continuing to roll on. Our very own Dan Howley, thank you so much.