WeWork co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch

WeWork – the shared workspace provider valued at $45 billion – has cut about 300 jobs which it says are performance-related, ahead of a hiring spree as the company plans to add 6,000 jobs this year, in addition to its current 10,000 headcount. This makes sense, given that the New York headquartered company raised $2 billion in January from Softbank, the Japanese based tech conglomerate which has poured more than $10 billion into the company.

Although WeWork was predicted to be heading for a $2.3 billion annual run rate by 2018 end, expenditures have increased, leading to a said net loss of $723 million over the first half of 2018, up from $154 million a year earlier. The company has been expanding its locations in recent times, signing its biggest lease of the year just this week.

A WeWork location in Paris, France image : WeWork

It was also reported to be in talks for space at Manhanttan’s One World Trade Center, although this fell through. Even with leading market share in the shared workplace market, WeWork is facing increasing competition from startups like Knotel, The Wing and Convene. These companies have raised significant funding recently – Knotel raised $60 million in October, The Wing raised $75 million in December, Convene raised $152 million July last year.

But this pales in comparison with WeWork’s near $13 billion total funding, according to Crunchbase data. WeWork began this year with more than 400,000 members at 425 locations in 100 cities across 27 countries. Enterprise customers (members with more than 1,000 employees) accounted for more than 30% of total members. The company also says it had 30% of the Global Fortune 500 as customers as of September 2018.

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