After last week’s announcement that the company would be scaling back its consumer divisions, Infospace announced last night that it has laid off 250 employees in an effort to best capitalize on the company’s business opportunities in its high growth areas such as wireless, merchant and broadband.
The layoffs represent approximately 21% of the Bellevue-based company’s 1200 worldwide employees.
“The toughest things is that we’ve had to see this huge shift in the market,” said Company Spokesman Steve Stratz. “Everybody’s tightening the belt and at the end of the day we’re going to have to tighten our belts too.”
Despite a recent managerial sweep of former Go2Net execs, yesterday’s layoffs appear to be across the entire company, both locally and abroad.
“As part of the final integration of Go2Net and our renewed focus on our strongest growth areas, we have reexamined the business and its needs,” said Ed Belsheim, COO of InfoSpace. “The refocus of the company has led us to de-emphasize those parts of our business that are low growth and non-scalable and align our resources and costs along the strong growth areas.”
According to Stratz, each employee was given 2 weeks of severance, plus one week for every six months of service to the company. Also, InfoSpace is providing a three-day career transition program for employees.
