BEIJING, February 25 (TMTPOST)— Another Chinese internet giant may experience major layoff. The rumor this time targets Baidu, the largest search engine operator and leading artificial intelligence (AI) company in China.

Source: Visual China

Baidu has launched a wide-scale layoff affecting multiple businesses including Mobile Ecological Business group (MEG) and AIG, an important AT business group including Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Group (ACG), Technology Middle Platform Group (TPG) and Infrastructure Group (INF), since Jananary, Chinese tech news media outlet 36Kr learned from employees at many departments on Friday. Some of employees estimated that their departments cut about 10% to 15% of workforce, covering workers at both the junior and medium level and the senior level. The sacked staff told 36Kr that Baidu didn’t give the extra severance pay equivalent to one-month salary as TPG, a group that is said to lay off about 10% of employees, offered two choices: either to resign by the end of this month with severance based on the number of years that the employee has worked for or to quit at the end of March without any severance.

This may be Baidu’s second round of layoff recently for Sina News reported its first move started from last December, which cut 50% of MEG’s staff and almost all the employees of the gaming department, more than 300 people, were fired. Baidu’s live streaming business was also reported to face a head count cut of 90%.  

Baidu later Friday responded that it does not have any layoff. Like other tech giants, it carried out normal optimization following the seven-day Chinese New Year beginning at February 1 and the affect people was less than 10% of the company, the company added though not revealing  the specific optimization target.

Earlier this month, Xiaomi was said to plan to reduce 10% of corporate staff, involving mobile, app store, technology and other related departments, and Didi Chuxing reportedly started to lay off 20% of staff and is set to affect almost all of the divisions across the company. Reports of games companies in Shanghai undergoing layoffs have been circulating earlier this week. Lilith was reported to dismiss the team responsible for the development of Japanese anime-style turn-based mobile game E.D.E.N, and NetEase was said to have already halted the development of a few games in last August.