Alibaba Reduces Headcount by 34% in 2025; Baidu and BYD Report Smaller Cuts

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba reduced its head count by 34% in 2025, according to its annual report filed at the end of March 2026. Baidu, operator of China's biggest search engine and video-streaming service iQiyi, ended 2025 with nearly 7% fewer employees.

Electric-vehicle maker BYD cut roughly 10% of its workforce during the same year, with the reductions disclosed in annual reports from all three companies.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 by Jack Ma and operates platforms including AliExpress, Taobao, and Tmall. A former Baidu employee, laid off from the marketing department in March 2026, said the company cited financial pressure as the reason for her dismissal. She added that Baidu has been cutting people in non-core departments since last year.

BYD laid off part of its frontline production staff, administrative teams, and sales department in 2025, even as it accelerated hiring for research and development roles by nearly 5%. Tencent, best known for its super-app WeChat and a major player in the video gaming industry, reported a 5% increase in head count in 2025, bringing total staff to 115,849.

A former Tencent executive said the company has been simultaneously hiring and firing since the pandemic in 2020, with hiring now focused more on fresh graduates.

Claire Deng said Chinese tech companies froze hiring in 2022 but noted an uptick in the past year due to new business opportunities driven by the AI boom. She stated there has been a surge in hiring related to AI-agents and physical AI products, while some jobs on the frontline are already being replaced by AI.

Deng added that some companies are experimenting with replacing staff with AI, but that requires a full redesign of workflows and talent structures.

Sun Zhongwei said many companies expanded rapidly during the internet boom, hiring at an exponential pace. Chen Li said Chinese companies share financial pressure with American companies in reallocating resources to AI businesses. Rest of World reported that Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and BYD did not respond to requests for comment.

-based firms, according to an April report by RationalFX. Snap laid off 16% of its staff, around 1,000 people, in April 2026 and withdrew hundreds of open roles. Oracle shed thousands of employees in March 2026.

In 2025, Amazon cut about 30,000 jobs, while Meta laid off more than 1,000 employees. 5% through 2030. The government has warned that AI development would bring inevitable job losses due to a restructuring of the labor market and has pledged to boost emerging industries such as AI and EVs to generate new jobs.