The management team believes this is the case. They have a lot of information on the company and individual performance. Do you have any reason to believe they are wrong with this particular choice?
I would counter that this suggests the management team believes layoffs will be beneficial to management.
What is beneficial to management may or may not actually be in the best interest of shareholders (and neither incentive necessarily aligns with the interests of either customers or employees).
The dividend keeps the stock price high, which is good for both shareholders and employees. Cutting employment is how you manage to pay the dividend when you losing money. Not paying the dividend would crash the stock price and make lots of things harder.
If you believe Intel will be profitable again in the near future then paying the dividend really does make sense. Unfortunately there have been lots of companies that thought that was true when it wasn't and the dividend is how they ran out of runway quick.
> If you believe your company will be profitable you should reinvest all avaliable capital into the business to grow it.
No, because being profitable doesn’t mean marginal profits from expansion are available. Your plan would have all profitable firms expanding until they collapse from overextension.
> Did they make a mistake when they were hiring or did they make a mistake now when they are firing?
You cant believe both simultaneously.
No it's entirely plausible that hiring then was the right decision and firing now is the right decision. There's no universal law that says you must hire people for eternity.
Facebook literally fired people they hired a week prior.
Why do you feel the urge to make excuses for managerial incompetence.
Like when you are a worker, they must be scruitinised to make sure they arent lazy or incompetent, but the day you get promoted to executive you gain godlike immunity from criticism
It’s not up to you to decide if what the management did is right or wrong, it’s up to the shareholders. They own the company and they appoint the management. If they make bad decisions it’s up to them to replace them.
They do it indirectly via the board of directors, they are the representatives of the shareholders (akin to a representative democracy). It is a common scenario for the shareholders to vote in a new board to replace the existing management.
What is beneficial to management may or may not actually be in the best interest of shareholders (and neither incentive necessarily aligns with the interests of either customers or employees).