Bay Area’s Roku lays off hundreds of workers for third time in year

Roku, the San Jose-based video streaming giant, is laying off a large chunk of its workforce for the third time in less than a year.

The company announced that it will cut “approximately 10%” of its workforce in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission signed Wednesday. That likely amounts to at least 300 employees, given an SEC filing from December 2022, in which the company said it employed roughly 3,600 full-time employees, and the 200 workers cut in April. (Roku made a separate 200-person cut last November, as well.)

In the same Wednesday filing, Roku wrote that it plans to quit some of its offices, too, which it anticipates will cost the company between $160 and $200 million. Roku is headquartered next to PayPal Park in San Jose, but has offices in a number of American cities, as well as in Europe, Canada and Asia. Roku also used the filing to project higher revenue for the third quarter than Wall Street was expecting, according to the Associated Press. The company’s stock price has more than doubled this year, but still sits at less than a fifth of its 2021 peak.

The company also said it would remove some content from its streaming service to cut costs. Roku did not respond to SFGATE’s requests for comment. SFGATE also did not find a relevant layoff notice on file with California’s Employment Development Department.

Roku began as a project at Netflix, but the video giant spun off its device business in 2008 so that other hardware sellers wouldn’t see Netflix as a competitor. Roku helped popularize the devices that host streaming platforms and eventually launched its own channel and content line, a move that came as newer TVs incorporated access to streaming services into their standard functionality and rendered Roku’s standalone devices out-of-date. The firm reported a “net loss” of around $500 million in its December 2022 SEC filing.

Repeat job cuts have proliferated across the Bay Area as the tech industry responds to pandemic-era overhiring and profit-hungry investors. Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, cut 21,000 employees across four separate layoff rounds. In late August, SFGATE reported that tech consulting firm Hero Digital had laid off at least 15 workers five times in the 12 months before it pulled its headquarters from San Francisco.

The three rounds of layoffs at Roku likely have affected at least 700 employees in total. The company wrote Wednesday that severance and benefits packages from this layoff round will cost at least $45 million. One former Roku marketer took to LinkedIn on Thursday to announce she’d lost her job; she started her post, “Third time isn’t the charm.”

Hear of anything happening at Roku or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.