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Lanon Wee

Google Reducing Positions at Waze Amid Its Integration of Mapping Services

In an email sent on Tuesday, the head of Google's map division announced that job cuts are being made at Waze as a result of the company's efforts to integrate Waze with its own mapping products, which started in late 2020. The email also revealed that the goal is to create a "more scalable and optimized Waze Ads product". Google is reducing its workforce at Waze, its mapping service, as it is combining the unit with its own map products. Chris Phillips, head of Google's Geo division, informed staff in an email that the transition to Google Ads as the main ads system will lead to job losses in fields such as sales, marketing, operations and analytics. He further explained that the aim is to build a "scalable and optimized" Waze Ads product by winding down the old one. Phillips said the company would notify advertisers and business partners of the change on Wednesday, and his team will clarify the next steps at the upcoming Waze Town Hall on July 11. The size of the cuts wasn't specified and Google did not reply to the requests for comment. With over 500 employees, Waze was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion in 2013. Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced in January that it is cutting 12,000 jobs, representing 6% of its workforce, in the wake of reduced income growth. Furthermore, some projects have been extinguished, others downsized and there is an effort to become more economically viable. Since December, Google has consolidated Waze and its Geo division in charge of maps, with Neha Parikh, former CEO of Waze, leaving as a consequence.The Waze app uses crowdsourcing to compute the quickest routes between two points, based on recent traffic details, and has about 140 million active users. In the email, Phillips expressed appreciation for the employees' contributions and success of Waze, calling the decisions "incredibly hard". No comment was given by a Google spokesperson. Any indication of decline in search can have an impact on Google's long-term growth prospects.

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