The shares of Alphabet , Amazon (AMZN) , Apple (AAPL) and Facebook (FB) responded to the announcement of unexpectedly good quarterly figures for the four tech companies in pre-market trading session on Friday. As a result, the shares were close to their respective record highs (Amazon and Alphabet) or even higher (Apple and Facebook).
And during the FB earnings conference call from Thursday, July 30, CEO of Facebook Inc talked, among other things, about the future of remote work within the Company. He said that even before COVID Facebook had a long-term goal of enabling more remote work since the ability to feel present even when you’re remote is a core aspect of their own product work on video presence, workplace and virtual and augmented reality.
“the reason why we’re shifting to more remote work is that we think that culturally, it will allow us to attract more talented people. We’re not doing this primarily as a cost-saving measure.”-Mark ZuckeRberg
He added that Facebook is:”using this moment to accelerate these plans. And I expect that up to 50% of our employees will be remote long term within the next 5 to 10 years. This will enable us to attract and retain broader pools of talent regardless of where they live.”
David Wehner, Facebook CFO also touched this topic and said:”We had our strongest hiring quarter ever in Q2, adding over 4,200 net new hires, primarily in technical functions. We ended the quarter with over 52,500 full-time employees, up 32% year-over-year.” and continued on remote work “The main thing we’re trying to do is access a greater talent pool, which ultimately might give us more opportunity to grow head count. So I think there’s an effect there that’s, I think, in addition to cost in the sense that we would have a greater pool of people that we could recruit from.”.
Facebook, Inc. Common Stock (NASDAQ: FB) price went up 7% in the pre-amrket session on Friday which is more than $16.00 higher then Thursday afternoon.
At the same time, the number of users continued to rise rapidly: in the past quarter, FB added more than 100 million monthly active user – and now there are a total of 2.6 billion. At nearly $ 5.2 billion, the profit was about twice as high as in the same quarter of the previous year.
