After Zomato, Swiggy to lay off 1,100 employees

Online food ordering and delivery platform Swiggy just announced that the company is laying off 1,100 employees over the next few days. The number spans across grades and functions in the cities and head office. The decision comes as a measure to cut costs in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In an official blog, Sriharsha Majety, Swiggy’s co-founder and CEO wrote that the crisis has negatively impacted its core food delivery business and the brand is looking at other offerings and building a leaner organisation for survival.

“This offers us opportunities to continue investing our efforts in grocery and other service offerings that we think will continue to do well. We are going to invest in these high-confidence efforts to focus not on surviving alone, but on growing along the way by adapting very quickly. To enable this, we have already re-aligned some team members from other businesses into these initiatives,” Majety wrote.

“While Covid might have long-term tailwinds for the delivery business and digital commerce when things settle eventually, nobody knows how long the uncertainty will last,” Majety added.

The moves comes only a few days after Swiggy's arch rival Zomato announced that the company was downsizing its workforce by almost 13 per cent in the coming days. Speaking about the impact of the crisis, Deepinder Goyal, founder and CEO of Zomato in a company blog wrote, “A large number of restaurants have already shut down permanently, and we know that this is just the tip of the iceberg. I expect the number of restaurants to shrink by 25-40 per cent over the next 6-12 months.”

Zomato is actively looking it reducing its recurring expenses which includes its 150+ offices globally. This is also accompanied by pay cuts (a maximum of 50 per cent).