Beleaguered Snapdeal to hand pink slips to 3,000 employees: Report

This is part of the company’s cost-cutiing exercise at a time when it is struggling to raise fresh funds and grow the business, due to intense competition from Amazon and Flipkart

Delhi-based e-commerce major Snapdeal will fire between 1,000 and 3,000 employees in the next couple of months, according to a report by The Economic Times. This accounts for about 30 per cent of Snapdeal’s total workforce.

This is part of the company’s cost-cutiing exercise at a time when it is struggling to raise fresh funds and grow the business, due to intense competition from Amazon and Flipkart, who together hold more than 70 per cent of the total e-commerce marketshare in India.

According to this report, the decision will affect nearly 1,000 direct employees and 2,000 contracted employees working for its subsidiary and logistics unit Vulcan Express.

A few days ago, the company sent an email communication to managers in the marketplace operations to “right-size” their respective teams, added the ET report.

Snapdeal had last year handed ink slips to around 200 people.

Snapdeal, once the second largest e-commerce player in India, has been struggling over the last two years and lost marketshare to Amazon and Flipkart. Snapdeal, which had raised US$650 million in funding from SoftBank in 2014, has not been able to attract major investment after the growth slowed down.

Founded in 2010, Snapdeal was started as an online deals platform, which later pivoted to a full-fledged horizontal e-commerce company with a marketplace model in 2011. Owned by Jasper Infotech, it also counts among its investors companies like eBay, Kalaari Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Ratan Tata, BlackRock, Temasek, Myriad Asset Management, Tybourne Capital, PremjiInvest and Saama Capital.