Swiggy lays off 380 staff; shuts Meat Marketplace

NEW DELHI:  Foodtech company Swiggy has laid off 380 employees as part of its restructuring exercise. It will also shut down its Meat marketplace. In an internal note to employees on Friday, CEO Sriharsha Majety said the growth rate for food delivery has slowed down against its projections.

“This means that we needed to revisit our overall indirect costs to hit our profitability goals. While we’d already initiated actions on other indirect costs like infrastructure, office/facilities, etc, we needed to right-size our overall personnel costs also in line with the projections for the future. Our overhiring is a case of poor judgement, and I should’ve done better here,” he said.

In 2021, driven by a surge in demand during the second wave, Swiggy’s food delivery business grew strongly. Also, the company found early success with Instamart. Looking at these, the company invested into building its teams to be able to cater to the needs of the categories.

However, in 2022, due to challenging macroeconomic conditions, companies around the world are adjusting to the new normal, with refreshed investment horizons and accelerated timelines for profitability, he said. Over the last year, the company has also identified many areas for improvement in its pace of execution.

“Due to the iterative build-up of different organisations, there have been some extra layers created in pockets. This definitely increased our communication overhead and compromised our agility. This meant that instead of doing more with less, we were doing less with more in these cases,” the CEO said.