Layoffs have taken place across Tech and IT companies including Google, Infosys, Tech Mahindra and more in 2023. Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship and Electronics and Information Technology of India, Rajeev Chandrasekhar believes that people overestimated the demand for digital products during the pandemic.

In an interview with an English daily, the minister stated, “If we look at the tech space, layoffs occurred post-Covid, it happened to companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and even smaller startups. It has happened to the biggest and the smartest and the greatest, and then the small startups as well. Everybody coming out of Covid thought that digital boom and the expansion will be a permanent phenomenon.”

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) announced its April-June quarter results for the current fiscal today, a day after the demerger of its financial services arm. The oil-to retail empire's net profit declined 10.8 per cent to ₹16,011 crore, while revenue from operations dell 4,69 per cent to ₹2,31,132 crore. The oil-to-chemicals (O2C) arm's revenue declined 17.7 per cent to ₹1,33,031 crore on sharp reduction in global crude oil prices. The weakness in O2C biz offset the growth reported by retail and telecom arms - Reliance Retail and Reliance Jio in the quarter-under-review.

The tech job market has seen a lot of layoffs recently and in the last few months, several companies fired employees as a measure to cut costs and grapple with present market conditions. Microsoft, Twitter, Meta, Google, and Amazon, among others, laid off thousands of employees and since then, LinkedIn has been full of posts from people who have been impacted. 

One such former Microsoft employee took to LinkedIn and shared how she was told on call that it was her last day at work and that she was being laid off due to 'organisational changes and cost reduction'. 

Infosys is slated to release its June quarter numbers (Q1FY24) on July 20 (Thursday). The firm is expected to follow its peers' suit and post soft numbers for the first quarter of the current fiscal. The IT sector has been hammered for around a year owing to tough macroeconomic conditions, especially due to the fears of a recession in the US economy. However, in the last few sessions, the IT universe has seen immense buying interest. On Tuesday, the technology stocks led the gains and Infosys (up nearly 4 per cent) emerged as the biggest gainer on the index. 

Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani on Tuesday once again slammed the US-based short seller Hindenburg Research report terming it “a combination of targeted misinformation and discredited allegations.” Addressing the company’s 31st Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2023, Adani told investors that in January this year, the US-based group had published a report to short the company’s stocks just as they were planning to launch the largest Follow-on Public Offering in India’s history. 

“The report was a combination of targeted misinformation and discredited allegations, the majority of them dating from 2004 to 2015. They were all settled by the appropriate authorities at that time. This report was a deliberate and malicious attempt aimed at damaging our reputation and generating profits through a short-term drive-down of our stock prices,” Adani said in a video message.