Struggling Mobileye to lay off hundreds of workers, mostly in Israel

Mobileye, the Jerusalem-based developer of advanced vision and self-driving technologies, said Monday that it was laying off about 200 employees, or about five percent of its global workforce.

The developer of technology for autonomous car systems employs more than 4,000 employees, 3,000 of whom are based at the company’s Israel offices in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva, Ramat Gan and Jerusalem. Most of the layoffs are expected to affect employees in Israel, as part of streamlining measures across the firm’s divisions.

“As part of an ongoing response to changing needs, adjustments are being made to the workforce,” Mobileye said in a statement. “The company will support affected employees, while continuing to recruit for positions required to realize its long-term plans.”

Mobileye, co-founded and led by CEO Prof. Amnon Shashua, became an Intel Corp. company in 2017, after being acquired by the US chipmaker for $15.3 billion, marking the largest exit for an Israeli tech company at the time. Since going public and listing on the Nasdaq US exchange in 2022, the firm has increased its workforce by about 30%.

The firm has seen its shares slump more than 40% since the start of the year, giving it a market value of $9.5 billion.

Earlier this year, Intel divested almost $1 billion of its holdings in the Jerusalem-headquartered autonomous driving subsidiary, reducing its stake to about 80%. The chipmaker, which had been in a major slump since 2021, has seen its share price turn around in the past year, driven by the company thinning down its ranks of managers and forging new partnerships.

The layoffs follow Mobileye shutting down some of its units in response to shrinking demand in certain products and declining revenue. In September, the self-driving tech firm closed its lidar sensor development division and let 100 employees go.