Two months after laying off 1,100 people, food delivery unicorn Swiggy has axed 350 jobs again in what it is calling the “final realignment.”
In May, the company began “realigning resources to create capacity in higher potential areas,” hoping it would be enough to take the business to pre-COVID-19 levels. “However, with the industry still only having recovered to about 50% of its peak, we have to, unfortunately, go ahead with this final realignment exercise, which will result in the net loss of 350 jobs,” Swiggy said in a statement.
“We are concluding the exercise we began late May and there are no plans for any further restructuring,” it added.
Those being laid off would get a minimum of three to eight months of salary based on tenure, accelerated vesting of ESOPs, learning support for technical and professional skill development, job placement, and counseling services, among other things.
This comes almost a month after Swiggy completed its Series I funding round of USD 150 million led by South African internet giant Naspers, with participation from Ark Impact, Korea Investment Partners, Samsung Ventures, and Mirae Asset Capital Markets. With the latest funding, Swiggy, which holds the largest market share in India’s soon to be USD 8 billion food-tech market by 2022, has raised a little over USD 1.6 billion to date.
In May, Swiggy’s arch-rival Zomato had also let go 13% of its 4,000-staff and announced up to 50% of the salary cuts for the rest.
Swiggy isn’t the only tech company that had to resort to the second round of lay offs after the lockdown was lifted. In the third week of July, health and fitness startup Curefit furloughed and laid off around 600 employees, after cutting 800 jobs in May. Earlier this month, Scooter rental platform Bounce laid off 130 employees or 22% of its workforce. In March, local media Entrackr reported that the Bengaluru-based startup had fired 120 people.
Companies that held on for a while before resorting to job cuts like others in the industry, have also given in to the economic pressure.
In mid-June, Paisabazaar, a digital lending marketplace owned by the SoftBank-backed Policybazaar, laid off more than 1,500 employees to cut costs. At around the same time, Navi General Insurance, founded by much celebrated Indian entrepreneur Sachin Bansal, fired 40 employees reducing the team of about 163 people by a fourth in a restructuring exercise. In January, Bansal, co-founder of e-commerce giant Flipkart, had acquired DHFL General Insurance and rebranded it as Navi General Insurance.
In July, Naspers-owned fintech giant PayU laid off around 40-50 people at PaySense, the digital credit business it had acquired in January this year. The same month, Bizongo, a B2B marketplace for providing packaging solutions, let go of 140 employees to reduce cash burn and conserve capital.
However, earlier this month, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal in a blog post said that original salaries have been re-instated for all the employees. Apart from Zomato, a handful of other companies have also restored their employees’ salary to the original. Online travel firm Ixigo, e-grocer Grofers, and edtech company UpGrad, have rolled back the salary cuts that they implemented during the lockdown.
