Consumer electronics giant Dyson’s profits were nearly halved in 2024, despite selling more products this year than they have ever before.
The company’s pre-tax profit for 2024 fell to £561 million (roughly $754 million) from £1.1 billion ($1.48 billion) the year before.
It was also the first time the company reported a fall in sales in over two decades, according to The Telegraph, despite selling a record-breaking 20 million products this past year. Dyson’s new product launches in 2025 included an AI-powered robot combination vacuum and wet floor cleaner, and the company’s billionaire owner, Sir James Dyson, has said that they are preparing for more product launches in the home appliances category.
Known for hit products like the bagless vacuum and TikTok-famous hand dryers, Dyson’s 2024 was marked by a cost-cutting initiative despite being in the midst of a popularity boom the past two years.
Yearly revenue fell from £7.1 billion (a little over $9.5 billion) to £6.6 billion (roughly $8.8 billion) in what the company’s CEO Hanno Kirner has called “a difficult but necessary year of transformation.”
In July 2024, the company laid off around 1,000 employees in the UK, equaling one-third of its British workforce, and in October, the company laid off an undisclosed number of workers in Singapore.
Globally, Dyson has 10,000 employees, down from 13,000 in early 2022. Although a British company at heart, Dyson moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2019 and manufactures most of its goods in the region.
At the time of the UK layoffs, Dyson blamed “increasingly fierce and competitive global markets.” Dyson’s major competitors include the buzzy SharkNinja, German home appliance manufacturer Miele, and Samsung.
This time around, on Monday’s earnings call, Dyson executives blamed one-off factors for the massive revenue decline, like currency volatility in Asia and Turkey, where Dyson sells most of its products, a global reorganization of the business, and a factory fire that led to a shortage of supply in its beauty products.
But despite those one-off factors weighing on profit, executives did admit that the financial strain was still due in part to “slower economic growth in 2024 and reduced consumer confidence in some key markets.”
Although a worldwide recession is still not in the cards, the global economy is set for its weakest run in nearly two decades.
“Heightened trade tensions and policy uncertainty are expected to drive global growth down this year to its slowest pace since 2008 outside of outright global recessions,” the World Bank wrote in a press release in June. “If forecasts for the next two years materialize, average global growth in the first seven years of the 2020s will be the slowest of any decade since the 1960s.”
The U.S. is experiencing (and causing via Trump’s tariffs) its fair share of economic pressure as well. U.S. consumer confidence declined to a five-month low in September due to inflation and a weakening job market, according to data from the Conference Board that was unveiled on Tuesday.
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