Waze, the Google-owned navigation and mapping service which was founded by Israelis, will lay off 5 percent of its global workforce, or about 30 people out of 555 total employees, the company’s CEO said in an email to employees on Thursday, according to The Verge.
Waze will also close several of its offices in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions as it seeks to refocus its business on certain markets.
The company said the layoffs were partly due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has emptied roadways around the world and sent many cities into lockdown. As shelter-in-place and working from home become the new norm, fewer people are using Waze for their daily navigation needs resulting in less advertising revenue for the company.
Waze was founded by Israelis Ehud Shabtai, Amir Shinar and Uri Levine and was purchased by Google in 2013 for $966 million. The application has seen a dip in both monthly active users, or the number of customers using the app each month, and driven kilometers, the metric by which the company measures how far its customers drive while using Waze.
In April, Waze laid out in a blog post just how severely some of those numbers are falling. Globally, Waze customers drove 60 percent fewer miles in March, when lockdowns started going into effect, as compared to February. Italy specifically saw the biggest drop at 90 percent. The US was also down by about 60 percent.
As the pandemic stretched on, those figures got worse. Waze says that at one point during the lockdown, global weekly driven kilometers were down 70 percent. Since June, Waze has begun to see a recovery of driving as people returned to work in countries where restrictions have been lifted. Globally the company says it’s back to pre-COVID-19 driving levels.
Waze will “rethink priorities,” CEO Noam Bardin said in the email, “and we’ve decided to focus our resources on product improvements for our users, accelerate our investments in technical infrastructure, and refocus our sales and marketing efforts on a small number of high-value countries.”