Swiggy to lay off another 350 employees in ’final alignment’ exercise

BENGALURU: After laying off 1100 employees across cities in May, food tech unicorn Swiggy has decided to let go of another 350 employees, in what is being termed as the second wave of layoffs at the company.

According to Swiggy, the food tech industry has recovered only to about 50%, as it was expecting a sharper comeback, from the covid-crisis.

"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-19 levels in the near-term. However, with the industry still only having recovered to about 50 per cent of its peak, we have to, unfortunately, go ahead with this final realignment exercise, which will result in the net loss of 350 jobs,” said Swiggy in a statement.

A Swiggy spokesperson said this is the final ‘restructuring’ exercise, undertaken by the foodtech major, with no additional layoffs expected in the coming months.

Swiggy said it will provide a minimum three to eight months of salary, including an extra month of ex-gratia for every year served in addition to their notice period pay, to its laid off employee base.

At the time of layoffs in May, Swiggy had decided to accelerate the ESOP vesting process to the nearest quarter (including the months of notice period) and also decided to provide accident and term insurance for impacted employees (until December’20) , which will be applicable to its current laid off employee base, as well.

Earlier in June, Swiggy had also said that it is merging operations of its on-demand premium food delivery service Scootsy, which it acquired in 2018, within the Swiggy platform.

For Swiggy, food delivery still accounts for more than 80% of its business, which diversified into the grocery delivery segment and launched a task-based service Swiggy Genie during the covid-19 induced lockdown.

In May, Swiggy had also undertaken the exercise to shut and relocate many of its non-profitable cloud kitchens. Along with this, it had laid off 500 of its cloud kitchen workforce, which also included contractual employees.

The covid-19 crisis has forced startups to restructure their business as they undertake a second wave of layoffs. Recently, health and fitness platform, Curefit also laid off and furloughed almost 600 employees, earlier this month.