ByteDance’s Pico reportedly laid off hundreds of its staff - PingWest

ByteDance’s Pico reportedly laid off hundreds of its staff

ByteDance’s Pico reportedly laid off hundreds of its staff

February 17, 2023 8:33 am

Pico, ByteDance’s virtual reality unit, is laying off hundreds of its employees amid a “structural optimization” attempt which started on Monday this week, according to people familiar with the matter and posts on MaiMai, a Chinese Glassdoor-equivalent.

News about Pico’s layoff trended on MaiMai on Thursday. Posts from MaiMai users tagged with “ByteDance employee” suggest people were laid off with fair compensation, and non-hardware related jobs were hit the hardest, with some teams letting go of 30% of their members.

PICO was founded in 2015, and incorporated into the China’s internet conglomerate ByteDance in September 2021. ByteDance acquired Pico for a whopping 9 billion yuan and merged it into ByteDance’s VR-related business line.

Shortly after the acquisition, ByteDance helped the PICO team grow several times to reach more than 1,000 people, with around 80% being R&D staff, according to National Business Daily quoting Zhou Hongwei, PICO’s president and Yang Zhenyuan, ByteDance’s VP.

At the time of the recent layoff, Pico has around 2,000 people in its team, according to Tech Planet, a Chinese tech media who also reported that Pico 4 Pro, Pico’s upcoming high performance headset would be launched in April or May this year, after months of delay.

Pico launched Pico 4, a stand-alone VR headset in last September, and target 1 million units sales at the time. The company has been heavily marketing itself on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China. PICO 4, sold 46,000 units in China in the first 18 days after launch, between September 27 and October 14, according to statistics by Sandalwood Advisors. 

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