Most relevant digital news

1.- Shopify laying off 10% of workforce

2.- Clearco quietly adjusts, cuts staff

3.- Spotify pops on revenue beat, subscriber growth

4.- Walmart just warned on profits & Shopify laid off 10% of employees; by contrast, The Coca-Cola Company defied inflation for a strong quarter. Against this backdrop, we released our new forecast for the US

1.- Shopify laying off 10% of workforce

Shopify is laying off 10% of its global workforce according to The Wall Street Journal. It’s backtracking on a pandemic bet that e-commerce growth would continue. “It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off,” said CEO Tobi Lütke in an internal memo. The approximately 1,000 cuts will be across the board, but most will be in recruiting, support and sales. Duplicate, overspecialized, and roles described as “convenient to have but too far removed from building products” are also being cut.

2.- Clearco quietly adjusts, cuts staff

Canadian tech startup Clearco has been quietly trimming staff and shrinking its office presence, while outwardly indicating that it didn’t need the same restructuring of similar companies. As The Logic reports, Clearco has been raising new funding and adjusting how it distributes money to handle its current financial realities. The company has also gone through several rounds of layoffs since the spring, but staff have not been informed of the size of the cuts, leaving everyone on edge.

3.- Spotify pops on revenue beat, subscriber growth

Spotify has continued to invest in its advertising, and ad-supported revenue grew 31% year over year to 360 million euros, reaching an all-time high of 13% of the total revenue for the quarter.??

Spotify reported 433 million monthly active users in its second quarter, up 19% year-over-year and 5 million above guidance.

Paid subscriber growth also beat guidance by a million users, growing 14% year-over-year to 188 million.?

Earnings per share: A loss of 85 euro cents per share vs. an estimated loss of 63 euro cents per share as expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv

Revenue: 2.86 billion euros vs. 2.81 billion expected by analysts, according to Refinitiv

Spotify has continued to invest in its advertising, and ad-supported revenue grew 31% year over year to 360 million euros, reaching an all-time high of 13% of the total revenue for the quarter.??

4.- Walmart just warned on profits & Shopify laid off 10% of employees; by contrast, The Coca-Cola Company defied inflation for a strong quarter. Against this backdrop, we released our new forecast on the US.

If 2020 was the great digital acceleration and 2021 was the physical retail rebound, growth in both physical retail and ecommerce in 2022 look less remarkable in comparison.

Non-ecommerce sales in the US, a close proxy for physical retail sales, are forecast to be up 5.9% in 2022, or roughly one percentage point higher than the CAGR for this market over the past 10 years. In other words, faster-than-usual growth, but not a groundbreaking year.

We expect ecommerce sales to increase by a greater percentage, 9.4% in 2022—but that’s the slowest growth rate since 2009.

The market right now is anything but steady, however. We’re deep into a series on The Era of Uncertainty at Insider Intelligence and are weaving a discussion of current market instability into almost everything we write.

Clients are looking to steer their ships in the right direction: searches on "inflation" and "recession" have surged on our site.

We'll continue to dive into how issues such as inflation, shifts in big tech and supply chain challenges are affecting retail, advertising, media, financial services, healthcare and more.