Zomato to lay off 3% of its total workforce to reduce costs: Report

The country’s oldest online food aggregation and delivery platform Zomato on Saturday said that it is going to lay off nearly 3 per cent of its workforce across the organisation on account of cost-cutting efforts and to turn profitable.

Zomato, which currently has nearly 3,800 employees, stated that layoffs will be based on regular performance.

"There has been a regular performance based churn of under 3 per cent of our workforce, there's nothing more to it," said a Zomato spokesperson.

At least 100 employees have already been impacted across functions like the product, technology, catalogue and marketing, MoneyControl reported citing sources.

The development comes after the co-founder Mohit Gupta resigned on Friday after a four-and-a-half-year stint at the company. This marked the third exit of a high-profile executive from the aggregator’s roster in the last few weeks. Moreover, the food delivery platform announced earlier this week that Rahul Ganjoo had ended his 5-year tenure as Head of New Initiatives.

Earlier in the month, Zomato's Vice President for global growth Siddharth Jhawar announced his departure as well.

This is not the first time that Zomato has carried out layoffs, the Gurugram-headquartered food aggregator had given pink slips to about 520 employees (13 per cent) in May 2020 as a result of the extended Covid pandemic-induced lockdown. Earlier, in 2015, some 300 employees were told to go. 

Zomato's net loss narrowed to Rs 251 crore for the September quarter, compared to Rs 429.6 crore in the corresponding period of the previous financial year. The company also revealed this is the first quarter where they crossed the billion-dollar mark in annualised revenue. The revenue increased 62.2 per cent to Rs 1,661 crore as against Rs 1,024 crore during the year-ago period.