Google Announces Further Hiring And Marketing Budget Cuts

Alphabet Inc's GOOG Google announced Thursday plans to halt hiring and cut down marketing budgets in non-essential businesses in the second half of 2020.

What Happened

"As we outlined last week, we are re-evaluating the pace of our investment plans for the remainder of 2020 and will focus on a select number of important marketing efforts," a Google spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. 

With the past two months of COVID-19 outburst leading to the company temporarily closing down offices in Asia, it has also decided to freeze the hiring for full-time and contract employees. In the first quarter of 2020, Google has already hired 4,000 employees.

Business Insider reported that Google's summer international teams would have their pay cut by as much as 50%.

In early April, Facebook Inc. FB COO Sheryl Sandberg said that they estimate 10,000 additional people to be hired in the product and engineering team by the end of 2020.

What Else

Leveraging the high interest of video conferencing Google's video calling app Duo has now been updated to make and receive video calls on Google Nest speakers available to 12 people at the same time.