The chaos continues at Twitter 2.0, with the company closing down several international offices, as new Twitter chief Elon Musk continues to cut costs, in an effort to get the company back on financial track.
According to reports, over the last week or so, Twitter has either closed, or been forced to close, its offices in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Mexico, Africa, Australia and South Korea. Twitter has also shut down several of its offices in Europe and India, amid broad-reaching actions.
Not all of the staff in these offices have been made redundant, as some have been asked to work from home instead, while some of the office spaces have also been closed due to non-payment of rent, as Twitter’s new management team works to rationalize the company’s position.
One of those offices, Twitter’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore, is now back in action, after the Twitter 2.0 team paid its rent obligations. That’s significant, because while Elon Musk has largely been focused on Twitter’s impact in the US (at least in his external communications), all of Twitter’s growth over the past few years has come from the Asia Pacific region, with India, in particular, becoming a major focus for the platform.
With this in mind, Twitter’s office closures in these key markets could be particularly impactful, with local representatives often providing a key link into local ad markets, content trends, political shifts, etc.
So while Twitter’s looking to cut costs, these closures could ultimately lead to a reduction in the company’s overall income, and it’s hard to see which will have a more significant impact on Twitter’s bottom line.
As reported by Business Insider, before Elon Musk’s takeover at the app, Twitter previously had offices in more than two dozen major cities around the world, including Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Manila, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Twitter also had around 20 offices in the US.
Now, the company’s looking to reduce its office footprint to only a few major cities, including the San Francisco head office (where it was also recently refusing to pay rent), New York, and LA, along with international outposts in London, Tokyo, and Dublin.
Which, again, will significantly reduce its operational expenses, but the broader impacts on the company could also, eventually, outweigh those benefits.
But then again, in a post-COVID world, where everyone is far more accustomed to meeting via video calls and working online, maybe local offices just aren’t as important as they once were, and maybe Twitter can use this push as a means to significantly drive down costs, and get itself back on the right track.
Which it desperately needs correct.
Shortly after his takeover at the app, Musk claimed that Twitter was losing $4 million per day, due to massive expenses and limited intake. He’s since sought to implement new avenues for the app to make more money, including his $8 per month verification plan, while he’s also culled around 75% of the company’s staff, with Musk continuing to cull employee numbers wherever he can.
It seems like that, inevitably, will have negative impacts. You can’t cut thousands of staff without some things falling apart, or maybe losing out in local markets. But thus far, Twitter is still running, and few would be bold enough to forecast Musk’s failure in this respect, given the success he’s overseen at his other companies.
Maybe, if Musk can get the right staff in place, with the right approach, he can mitigate the impacts, while crushing the app’s costs, on the path to a new way forward for the app.
Maybe. A lot of these impacts will also compound over time, so maybe, right now, the only true change is to Twitter’s bottom line, which looks great for Musk and Co. in their process of improving the business.
But sometime soon, more problems could well arise, and they may be far more costly than the immediate savings.
