Amid record-high inflation and a looming threat of recession, Zomato, the food ordering app, has laid off employees across functions, including technology, product and marketing, reported Livemint.
According to the report, almost 3 per cent of employees have already been affected across these divisions.
“There has been a regular performance-based churn of under 3 per cent of our workforce; there’s nothing more to it,” the Livemint report quoted a Zomato spokesperson as saying.
According to other media reports, the layoffs at Zomato have apparently affected close to 100 staff thus far. While there has been no official confirmation of the exact number of employees laid off, it has been reported that the process has been ongoing for about two weeks.
Co-founder Mohit Gupta resigns, third high-profile exit in recent days
The report about the layoff comes three days after its co-founder Mohit Gupta stepped down in the third major exit of a senior executive in a leadership role this month.
Gupta departed the Gurugram-based firm after four and a half years. He joined the company in 2018 and was in charge of Zomato’s food delivery unit. In 2020, he was promoted to co-founder.
This followed the exits earlier this month of Rahul Ganjoo, who was the new initiatives head, and Siddharth Jhawar, the previous head of the Intercity Legends service. Gaurav Gupta, another former Zomato co-founder, resigned two months after the firm went public.
Zomato had laid off 13% workforce last year
Notably, due to a commercial downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the food delivery app laid off approximately 520 people in May 2020, accounting for approximately 13 per cent of the workforce. Now, after the most recent wave of layoffs, Zomato has around 3,800 employees.
Both startups and the tech industry are having a difficult time right now. Amazon, Meta, and Twitter have all laid off thousands of staff worldwide, including in India. On November 9 it was reported that Meta has around 87000 employees worldwide, out of which around 11000 are being laid off by the company, in what was termed as the biggest employment layoffs in the history of the business. Prior to this, the microblogging social media platform Twitter laid off most of its employees in India on November 4, 2022. Though the company has laid off employees in its marketing, communication and engineering department in large numbers, other departments of the company are also undergoing significant shuffle and layoffs including the engineering department.
The CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, as well as the CFO and a few other senior executives were also fired by Elon Musk, who started his tenure there.