Layoffs can be as much about spending less money as refocusing the company. The company might layoff people who are very good at X but have no experience with Y because the company is not doing X anymore and is focusing on Y. From the announcement, "our pre-COVID plan for 2020 included [...] investing in innovation and creating new products", which suggests they hired people who were very experienced at X (a new product) but have decided to kill development on X. It would be nice if the post actually said what X was, since this whole post is totally generic. Retraining people to work on Y rather than laying them off would be nice, but maybe that would take too long and those people don't want to be retrained to work on Y, and will be much happier working on X somewhere else.