Inside Google’s plans to double its workforce in India despite layoffs and cost-cutting

Since the start of the year, search giant Google has outdone analyst’s earnings and profitability expectations. Its results for the first quarter of 2024—with its earnings per share and revenue both comfortably outstripping even optimistic forecasts—even saw its market capitalisation cross $2 trillion for the first time in its history.

Despite this record growth, however, the company has continued to take a scalpel to its workforce, periodically cutting jobs across functions and geographies. While this began with a cull of some 12,000 employees as the tailwinds of the pandemic began to taper off in early 2023, the threat of retrenchments amid a wider organisational restructuring still looms large.

Even as Google’s workforce may shrink in other geographies, though, its India team could grow exponentially in the coming years due to its relentless quest to cut costs.

According to senior executives close to Google The CapTable spoke with, the Mountain View-headquartered company is contemplating shifting its product development work for core services such as Search and Maps, among others, to India. This is expected to happen gradually over the coming years and will lower the cost of running key Google services globally.

“In a couple of years, Mountain View will move the product development and engineering work done for the Knowledge and Information (K&I) division from the US to India,” two executives close to Google told The CapTable. Google’s K&I division, headed by Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan, oversees search, maps, news, ads, commerce, and payments.

“The product and tech hirings over the next two years will effectively grow employee count in India by 2X,” said the first executive close to Google. The company currently employs 11,000 people across teams in the country.

This is something that the company’s India leadership team has been pitching to the Mountain View office for a few years, the two people quoted above said. This comes on the heels of Google announcing that it would begin manufacturing its Pixel smartphones in India.

India’s increased prominence in Google’s plans comes as the company’s India unit continues to grow at a rate of knots. According to two former and one current Google executive,  Google India clocked annual revenues of $5 billion in 2023. This includes revenue from ads, IT services, and cloud computing. Beyond this, Google’s mobile operating system Android boasts a 95% market share in the country, while Google-owned YouTube has 600 million monthly active users in India.