Swiggy Lays Off Another 350 Employees, Calls It ‘Final Realignment Exercise’

Indian foodtech unicorn Swiggy has laid off 350 executives, two months after it laid off 1,100 employees across departments. 

With its food delivery business witnessing a decline in revenues amid the pandemic, the company said it has had to undertake a realignment exercise. Yesterday, a report by Entrackr highlighted that the company was in the process of laying off 350 employees across operations, marketing, cloud kitchen and product teams. 

In a statement given to Inc42, the company said that in the last few months, it had scaled up its grocery delivery service and Swiggy Genie, which allows customers to get orders from nearby retail stores as well as send or receive packages from across the city. The company had also partnered with several ecommerce stores to provide last-mile connectivity and logistics support. 

Recently, Swiggy partnered with retail grocery stores like Vishal Mega Mart and FMCG player Marico to deliver products. It also offers to deliver essentials and other daily-use items through Swiggy Stores. Moreover, Swiggy, along with its rival Zomato, has started home delivery of alcoholic beverages and liquor across Jharkhand and Kolkata.

“In May, we began the exercise of realigning resources to create capacity in higher potential areas with the optimism of the business attaining pre-covid levels in the near-term. 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. We are concluding the exercise we began late May and there are no plans for any further restructuring,” the statement said. 

The company has announced a severance package for the impacted employees, which includes a minimum of three months of salary and an extra month of ex-gratia for every year they have worked for the company, along with accelerated vesting of ESOPs and extension of health insurance for employees’ families till December 2020. 

In May, Swiggy rival Zomato also laid off more than 5000 employees citing a fall in revenue. Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal had said that the company did not have “enough work for all our employees. We owe all our colleagues a challenging work environment but we won’t be able to offer that to 13% of our workforce going forward.”

In an analysis of Zomato’s annual report released earlier this month, Inc42 found that FY 2020-21 could bring a 54-58% revenue drop for the company.