Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META) has a history of spending aggressively on new technologies with often disappointing results. It acquired the Oculus VR headset maker more than a decade ago, but has struggled to turn that into a mainstream product despite investing billions of dollars into it.

It recently pulled the plug on its metaverse experiment nearly five years after rebranding the company around the virtual reality concept, and it announced layoffs in reality labs after the AI-focused division lost nearly $20 billion last year.

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Now, Meta is cutting staff again in an effort to retrench and focus on high-value opportunities in AI.

In an internal memo on Thursday, the Facebook parent said it would lay off 10% of its workforce, or about 8,000 employees. The company is also eliminating plans to fill 6,000 open roles.

The move comes as Meta continues to invest heavily in AI, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg also sees AI-powered tools like coding assistants taking over the work of engineers in the coming years.

Layoffs shouldn't be celebrated as they mean real people losing their jobs, but they can trigger a stock movement both when they're announced and as the impact of the cost cuts reveals itself in the financial results.

We've seen this before with Meta with its "Year of Efficiency" back in 2023, which led to a surge in the stock. Can the company repeat the same feat? First, a quick history lesson.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Meta's first year of efficiency

Meta stock plunged through 2022 as investors were skeptical of the metaverse push and as the digital advertising boom of the pandemic dried up, leading the company's revenue growth to briefly turn negative. The stock bottomed after a disastrous earnings report in Oct. 2022, and shortly after, the company said it would cut 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce, and followed that up with another 10,000 job cuts as Zuckerberg proclaimed a "year of efficiency."

If you had bought stock following the first job cut announcement in Nov. 2022 and held it through the end of 2023, you would have earned a return of 249%.

Of course, the layoffs weren't the only reason for those gains then, as tech stocks swung off a brutal bear market as the AI boom kicked off, but the cost cuts did help drive profit improvements. In 2023, Meta's net income jumped 69% to $39.1 billion, and its operating margin improved from 25% to 35%. Costs and expenses rose just 1% as revenue jumped 16%.