India’s top food delivery startup said on Monday that it is going to lay off 1,110 of its workers from their jobs as it is facing financial repercussions from Covid-19 Pandemic crisis on its businesses. Earlier food delivery startup Zomato had made an announcement that it will reduce its global workforce by 13 per cent or about 520 people as a result of financial fallout of Pandemic on its business.
In recent cultural development of maintaining the physical distancing amid the fear of contracting the disease, the aegis of ‘Cook at Home’ practice has sprung as an imperative preventive measure to avoid physical contact with possible people infected. And that has impacted food delivery service businesses like Swiggy. Placement of online food orders on Swiggy has plummeted to very less because of this reason.
To get out of the risk of facing major loss now, Swiggy had decided to reduce its cost of operation by scaling down some adjacent businesses and cutting down jobs. To officially announce the tough and unpleasant decision by its management team, Swiggy published an internal email on its blog. The company gave the details of the impact on its business due to the present scenario of the outbreak.
Its food orders have decreased from 3 million to fewer than a million orders a day. To cope up with the loss that its business is facing right now, it will cut down about 1,100 jobs across the grades and functions in the cities and head office in the next few days.
The company said that it will provide 3 months of salary to those who will be affected by this decision. And it will also provide additional salaries to them amounting one month of their salary for each year that they have spent at Swiggy as an employee. Medical and accidental coverage will be provided to them for the whole year of 2020 and also the counselling for their emotional, mental and financial stress issues.
Many employees working for Swiggy’s Cloud Kitchens Business will also be affected as it is one of the adjacent businesses that Swiggy has considered to scale down or shut down. This came as a surprise for many as Swiggy had been focussing on its expansion for more than 2 years and had invested in a million square feet of real estate space in 14 cities for this purpose of its expansion.