Future Group fires 400 employees to scale down e-comm venture

Mass layoffs in India are no longer limited to only the information technology and automobile sectors, as witnessed last year.

In the past couple of months, Indian companies and startups have been shedding jobs to balance their mounting financial stress. The massive layoffs are happening across segments, and this time the new-age startups are in the lead.

And the list of such firms continues to grow with every passing day.

While hospitality startup OYO recently rolled back operations in multiple cities and laid off thousands of its employees citing cost-cutting, payments firm Paytm and ride-hailing major Ola also fired over 1500 staff to balance their rising cost.

And next in line was Kishore Biyani-led Future Bazaar. The company, as part of a scale-down its e-commerce venture, has laid off about 400 employees.

"Future Group has fired staffs across roles in product development, marketing, sales and ground operations," said a Mint report quoting former employees of the company.

Entrackr's detailed queries in this regard did not elicit a response till the time this story was published.

To cut costs and achieve profitability, the firm has been shutting down its EasyDay stores. Most employees laid off were working on digital assets, including taking care of loyalty programmes at physical stores and the EasyDay app, the report added.

EasyDay app, which was slated to be launched nationwide, could not take off the way the company wanted.

In November, the company reportedly shut down close to 140 EasyDay stores out of its 1500 stores. Future Group confirmed that it would shut down over 50 EasyDay stores in Mumbai, Pune, Nashik and Ahmedabad.

This latest development might prove to be a setback for its e-comm retail growth plan.

Earlier in November 2017, Biyani had launched an e-commerce strategy - Retail 3.0 - intending to convert the entire offline journey of Future Group consumer into the online world.

A year later, Amazon's subsidiary NV Investment Holdings’ acquired about 49% stake in Future Coupons. Now, Amazon India is the authorized online sales channel for Future Retail Ltd stores.