India’s largest mobility platform and one of the world’s largest ride-hailing companies, earlier there have been reports that Ola will lay off 500 employees.
Earlier, CNBC had reported that the company’s nearly 500 employees are being laid off from the various software verticals of ANI technologies which operate as Ola Cabs.
However, now the company dismissed the report of sacking 500 employees. The company now clarified that it is “centralizing operations and is undertaking a restructuring exercise to minimize redundancy and build a strong lateral structure that strengthens relevant roles and functions”.
However, the company has said that it will be laying off nearly 200 people. These layoffs will be part of the restructuring exercise.
Ola said about 200 jobs from its overall engineering workforce will be cut to minimize redundancy as a part of the SoftBank Group-backed group’s restructuring exercise.
The company stated that 10 percent of the 2,000-strong engineer workforce has been asked to leave the organization.
The rider company said, “The company currently has around 2,000 engineers and aims to increase its engineering talent pool to 5,000 over the next 18 months.”
Earlier due to restructuring exercises nearly 500 employees were impacted. Due to that course, employees from the product, marketing, sales, supply, tech, business, and operations verticals were laid off.
In April 2022, Ola Dash scaled down its operations from 9 cities to 3 cities and dismissed over 2,100 contract workers. In 2020, it laid off around 1,400 employees from its food, rides, and financial services verticals due to the COVID pandemic.
The companies like Snap, Microsoft, Twitter, TikTok, Meta, and Google have either laid off employees or frozen new hiring.
Microsoft was among the first Big Tech firms to lay off about 1 per cent of its total staff strength of 180,000 in July, followed by 200 more in August. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Satya Nadella called it a part of the realignment exercise.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also hinted at layoffs to make the company 20 percent leaner/more efficient recently after an internal warning to employees to improve performance.
The development of either layoff or hiring slowdown comes after IT companies, crypto exchanges, and financial firms cut out jobs and slow down the hiring process due to slow global economic growth caused by higher interest rates, and rising inflation.
