A day after Snapdeal “won” the David-versus-Goliath fight – in this case big investors like SoftBank Group being Goliath – the company seems to have lost the plot in gaining the trust of its thousand-plus employees, whom it promised the moon.
Most of the team members had hoped that after Flipkart buys out the company they would finally get some breathing space and job security. But what they face in turn is a failed buyout deal and yet another round of layoffs.
So how many employees does Snapdeal really have? Guess what, in the last one-and-a-half years Snapdeal has effectively cut down its employee strength from 10,000 to 1,200. But it will not end there; to reach profitability and show favourable balance sheets, possibly for an IPO, the company is planning to remove 80 per cent of the remaining workforce as well.
In the past 24 hours, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal have sealed the fate of the remaining employees by not agreeing to a deal which would have given a new lease of life to his employees.
Many of the 1,200-odd employees had stuck around in the company as they were sure that the deal with Flipkart would happen. Now with the next round of layoffs being imminent, the employees have been left in a lurch.
According to a senior manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the management assured employees of a merger and assurance that every move would be made for the good of employees. They claim that the list of people to be laid off is all ready.
“As a manager, I had to let go half my team, bidding a tearful goodbye, within a matter of one week. They were made to forcefully resign, given some compensation, but even until the last moment it wasn't clear to them as to "Why me?" This was the most difficult question to answer to the loyalists who had given their sweat and blood to the rise of Snapdeal,” the person said.
Snapdeal on its part in a reply to a questionnaire sent by Business Standard said that no such assurance was given to the employees and attrition not layoffs is expected in the run up to Kunal Bahl’s pivot Snapdeal 2.0.
The person went on to claim that the workforce now absolutely has no doubt about the fact that continuity of an organization is more important than its individual employees. “When Snapdeal laid off almost 60 percent of its employees in February early this year, it was on a pretext of greener days that the organization would see through a possible merger with its larger rival Flipkart,” the person added.
With most of the real estate now lying empty, the company also apparently plans to relocate to from Snapdeal’s Gurgaon headquarters to a smaller office on Sohna Road in Haryana. Bahl has also made it clear in his email to employees right after turning down the Flipkart deal that there will be a need to keep a tight control on our costs and work towards becoming a hyper efficient culture delivering profitable growth, month on month.
“Finally, with the ongoing streamlining of costs and sale of some of our assets, such as Freecharge, we are financially self sufficient as a company and don’t need to raise additional capital to reach profitability. Needless to say, we will need to keep a tight control on our costs and work towards becoming a hyper efficient culture delivering profitable growth, month on month,” he said in the mail.