After declining the acquisition offer from Flipkart, the struggling eCommerce startup Snapdeal announced that it will continue to work as an independent entity with a vision of ‘Snapdeal 2.0’.
In order to do so, the company is going to let-go around 80 percent of its staff, and sell its other entities as well. It plans to survive and grow business based on the money received from the sale of FreeCharge to Axis Bank.
Now, latest reports suggests that Snapdeal’s product VP Pradeep Desai; Engineering VP Viraj Chatterjee and IT head Gaurav Gupta are among the first names to have exited the company.
Yesterday, it was reported that Business head of FMCG, Digvijay Ghosh and Business head of general merchandise, Rahul Jain had resigned from Snapdeal. It is contemplated that many more from the product, IT and engineering division are to follow.
As a part of the major layoff in the company, around 1,000 out of 1,200 employees will be let-go. Snapdeal has been struggling from some time and has already handed pink slip to several of its employees in the past.
The startup had laid off 500-600 employees amongst its e-commerce marketplace, its other firms — mobile wallet Freecharge and logistics part Vulcan Express, with ‘100% salary cut’ take.
It had also shut down its consumer-to-consumer marketplace ‘Shopo’ and disbanded SD Instant, its express delivery service. Categories like beauty and FMCG have been discontinued too.
Snapdeal’s losses more than doubled to ₹3,316 crore in fiscal 2015-2016, while its revenue growth dropped. The company had posted a 150% increase in losses from ₹1,328 crore in the year ended March 31, 2015.