Swiggy to lay off another 350 employees as coronavirus impacts business

Unicorn food delivery firm Swiggy is going for another round of job cuts and will lay off 350 employees across grades and functions over the next few days, as Covid-19 continues to impact its business.

This comes just two months after the Bengaluru-based firm said it was laying off 1,100 employees. Backed by China's Tencent and Prosus NV, Swiggy had around 8,000 employees.

“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,” said a Swiggy spokesperson. “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. We are concluding the exercise we began late May and there are no plans for any further restructuring,” he said.

Swiggy said it is committed to showing respect and compassion for its transitioning employees and will retain the thoughtful and robust care package that it had put together to ease their burden. This includes a minimum of 3 months to 8 months of salary based on tenure (includes an extra month of ex-gratia for every year served in addition to their notice period pay) and accelerated vesting of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). It is also extending accident and term insurance for impacted employees and health insurance for them and their families till December 2020. It is also providing learning support for both technical and professional skill development, job placement and counselling services and ownership of their laptop.

Swiggy has raised a total of $1.6 billion in funding from investors including Tencent, Samsung Ventures and Meituan Dianping and was valued at $3.65 billion. Meanwhile, the company said it has scaled up its grocery delivery and hyper-local delivery service ‘Swiggy Genie’ across cities, partnered with authorities to support benevolent causes and raised funds for its delivery partners. The company had also introduced initiatives including Jumpstart to assist its restaurant partners.