In the latest instance of employees getting the boot from amid challenging economic times and business models gone wrong, restaurant aggregator and food delivery giant Zomato seems to be reducing its headcount by nearly 4% across multiple departments.
The food aggregator platform informed that employees will be laid off on the basis of their regular performance, so productive employees seem to have a better chance of dodging the proverbial axe and continuing to work at Zomato for a little longer (that is, until Zomato decides to pull a Meta, or an Amazon and lay off significant portions of its workforce). Currently, the food delivery major employs around 3800 individuals, a number which will reduce if Zomato follows through and continues to trim its workforce over the coming days.
Reports suggest that it has already started laying off employees – at least 100 individuals have already been impacted by the layoffs. These employees span across multiple verticals, including product, technology, catalogue and marketing. Employees in the supply chain are safe from the layoffs, for now.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the roles that the impacted employees fulfilled had become “redundant,” since they were mostly from “mid-to-senior roles” and “were working when the product was being revamped. Not that the product work is over, they have been let go.”
These layoffs follow a string of departures of several top-level executives from the company. Earlier this month, Rahul Ganjoo, Head of New Businesses, Zomato, and Siddharth Jhawar, Zomato’s Vice President of Global Growth, resigned from their posts. They were followed by Mohit Gupta, co-founder of Zomato, who stepped down and quit on Friday.
The current round of layoffs seems to be the latest bid by the food delivery major to turn profitable amidst a slower rate of growth. It is already looking to cut costs – apparently, at the cost of several employees – and as the economic downturn and adverse macroeconomic conditions continue to make it tough for companies and startups to survive in the market, a new-found focus on profitability seems to be the only way of survival.
As far as quarterly performances are concerned, Zomato had a decent outing in the quarter ended September 30, 2022. Not only did its net loss for the quarter clock an annual drop, but its revenue from operations rose by 62% to reach ₹1,661 crores for the quarter. Alongside a rise in income from its Hyperpure unit, it also saw the gross order value of its food business grow for the quarter. It is not the performance, but the slower rate of growth, that worries Zomato.
