Given all the layoffs, discretionary spending will significantly go down in the two areas. How do we think it will impact luxury car market? Are dealers in those areas starting to push discounts to hedge risks?
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Although I do not work for any of the FAANGs / MAANGs, I work in Tech. Seeing all these layoffs is pretty concerning, but at the same time, it tells me that some of these companies overhired.
Regarding the car market, I doubt dealers are going to massively discount BMWs, MBs, Audis, etc. I’m in the Northeast, so not sure what the market looks like on the West Coast.
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PNW, like Colorado are kind of in their own little island as far as markets go.
I don’t think you’ll see much movement.
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I’m sure the demand in NorCal will drop, then dealer will react accordingly. I remembered after the financial crisis I took my Rx to service and they service literally cost 60% of what they used to charge.
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BMW is already around 8-10% off MSRP which is close to prior. I think our 530e was 12% off MSRP a few years back. The problem is there is limited manufacture incentives and the rates suck.
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I am sure just as tech overhired, dealers over bought (took allocation). Holding costs have to add up at some point.
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You are correct, that happened even before the layoffs, my local dealer had lots of X7 and X5 available even a few months ago.
Yeah there’s definitely dealers that are playing the allocation buying game to beef up their future allocations.
They’re gonna have to play ball if they want to keep those numbers.
Yep just trimming the fat. Inflation numbers are coming down (so they say) so the likelihood of soft landing rises everyday. Labor market still seems strong. The weakness will be in lower income sector.
We have recently seen a spike in clients circumventing brokers so perhaps that’s a valuable metric 
Edit: Meant to respond to bluemkn
I was actually thinking between the layoffs and the Tesla price cut, Rivian and Lucid deliveries might speed up significantly even for people with orders placed very recently…
This may sound a little counterintuitive but I feel like the initial Facebook layoffs may have helped the local market. People got 4-5 monthly salaries and if they were able to find another job right away some of them probably bought cars. When more companies start doing layoffs and people are not able to find another job quickly it should have some impact. That’s literally what the Fed wants.
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Doesn’t seem crazy to me at all. I work in tech and have multiple friends that were effected by the lay offs. Most of them are excited about the severance and not worried about finding a new job, senior product/engineering/UX folks are still getting him up by recruiters like on the daily so I know a lot of my friends are planning on taking a month or two off and then start looking for new roles.
Of course it helps if you have FANNG companies on your resume. But this layoff/recession has really not happened since 2018/2019, there’s almost a generation of tech workers that have not seen wholesale slow down like this. Even if they get a new job, I’m not sure first thing they will do is to go out and buy a new car.
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To add what you just mentioned, between layoffs so far at Amazon (18,000 folks), Google (12,000 folks), and Microsoft (10,000 folks), other tech companies also had layoffs in 2023. For example, Wayfair, headquartered in Boston laid off 1750 folks last week.
For a detailed list of layoffs, check out https://layoffs.fyi/.
EDIT: More than 50,000 folks have been laid off so far in 2023. The job market is going to be ultra competitive for anyone, even if you have a FAANG listed on your resume.
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Optimist take: Tech is what 8-12% depending how you measure. A number of those are H1-b’s (who are in an awful position).
50k is sizeable but also an opportunity for smaller firms to get talent they may never had had a chance to. A unemployed tech worker is a new idea waiting to take off(money just ain’t as cheap anymore).
Also some of these are “tech” jobs but not tech only skillsets - HR and other positions for example.
How these companies thought the pandemic was = perpetual growth and that we’d live in the meta, was wild as they came to jesus on some of these earnings calls.
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BMW always floods the market. There is always going to be a surplus of BMWs
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If I was in this business to rip peoples heads off, I’d be sitting in the tower or the business office.
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Exactly what we need this year. A massive surplus of….ummm…7 series’ or m850i’s…
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These companies are trimming the bottom 5% to 10% of their workforce. I mean, I’m no super employee, but I feel confident I am outside the bottom 10%.
The biggest issue w/ the severance package is the loss of unvested shares. Where compensation package maybe 50% stock and someone may have, say 10 years of shares accumulated, loosing all that equity is massive.
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I think you’re being a bit harsh by implying the layoffs are all performance based and these companies are simply “trimming the fat.” Role elimination can be for many reasons - they may be sunsetting/shifting the vision of a product or entire division (whether legacy or newly acquired) and can’t find/don’t have open roles to place folks from affected departments/product lines into. Tableau is just one recent example of this.
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