The COVID-19 crisis this week claimed about 200 jobs at GSMA, the telecommunications industry’s largest and most consequential body. Massive job cuts, which impacted about a fifth of the association’s workforce, hit four months after the group canceled its flagship annual conference in Barcelona.

GSMA, which previously employed about 1,000 people, earns about 80% of its annual revenue from MWC Barcelona, according to Bloomberg. The trade group’s CMO Stephanie Lynch-Habib told the news outlet that GSMA doesn’t expect to recover from the COVID-19 crisis until 2023, and it has cut bonuses and whacked non-staff spending by about 40% this year.

“Due to the cancellation of MWC Barcelona 2020 and MWC Shanghai 2020, it has been necessary to examine our priorities and to make some difficult choices regarding how we work and where we invest. Regretfully these changes impact our staff in offices around the world,” a GSMA spokesperson wrote in an email to SDxCentral.

“Reducing staff is always difficult but seems particularly unjust when market conditions outside our control drive the decisions. We are proud of our team, grateful for their work, and acknowledge that this situation is not a reflection on their work, contribution, or potential,” the spokesperson added.

MWC Barcelona was one of the first and largest events scrapped due to growing concerns over potential exposure to the coronavirus, following widespread abandonment by most of the industry’s largest companies. When the decision was ultimately to cancel the February event, COVID-19 had spread to more than 45,000 people and claimed the lives of at least 1,100 lives globally.

The virus has since infected nearly 7.3 million people and caused more than 412,000 deaths, according to the latest public health figures tracked by Johns Hopkins University. In the United States, the hardest hit country in the world, deaths are now above 112,000 people and almost 2 million people have been infected, accounting for more than 27% of the global case load in infections and deaths. 

GSMA is still confident that the annual event in Barcelona will go on as planned in late February 2021, but it admits that attendance will be impacted as many companies and individuals won’t yet feel safe traveling or attending in-person events. The group also, in partnership with CTIA, puts on the annual MWC Los Angeles event that is still scheduled for late October 2020.

The job cuts hit just one day after GSMA announced a new series of virtual events called GSMA Thrive, hinting at a reframing of events should the COVID-19 crisis extend through the remainder of 2020 and into 2021.