Pink Slips at Apple: Sales Team Hit in Rare Layoff Round
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In a rare move, Apple is slashing jobs in its sales departments, with dozens of sales personnel receiving pink slips, according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, who reports that Apple aims to simplify how products are sold to businesses, schools, and governments.
“To connect with even more customers, we are making some changes in our sales team that affect a small number of roles,” a spokesperson for the Cupertino, California-based company told Bloomberg in a statement. “We are continuing to hire and those employees can apply for new roles.”
Employees affected by the move have already been informed by Apple. Impacted positions include account managers overseeing relationships with large businesses, schools, and government agencies, as well as employees who staff Apple’s briefing centers for major customers.
While the company is positioning the layoffs as an effort to streamline its sales workforce by eliminating overlapping positions, affected employees believe Apple is simply moving more of its sales to third-party retailers. They say that some organizations prefer to work with those indirect sellers. The move would maintain sales while allowing the company to save money by cutting salary costs.
The layoffs came as a surprise to many employees, especially considering that revenue at the iPhone maker has actually been growing at an impressive clip. Apple is expected to generate sales of close to $140 billion in the December quarter, a new record.
Employees who have not secured another position in the company by January 20 will receive a severance package. Despite the layoffs, Apple is currently advertising sales roles on its jobs website, which ostensibly remain open to internal candidates.
The latest job cuts follow Apple’s elimination of around 20 jobs from its Australian and New Zealand sales teams.
Apple’s employment cuts included longtime managers and employees who had been with Apple for 20 or 30 years. A large number of those laid off were members of a government sales team that works with several government agencies, including the US Justice and Defense Departments.
That sales team had been facing tough going recently, thanks to the 43-day US government shutdown and cutbacks imposed by the Department of Government Efficiency (commonly known as DOGE), which was created to pursue large spending cuts when President Trump took office earlier this year.
While these layoffs may be surprising, Apple has been less affected by recent economic problems than many tech firms. Earlier this month, Amazon announced it would cut more than 14,000 employees from its payroll, while Facebook and Instagram parent Meta recently fired several hundred employees from its AI division.
Meanwhile, Apple’s employee count actually grew during 2024, even though the company went through four rounds of small-scale layoffs during the year.
