Byju’s set to lay off 2,500 employees to cut costs

The edtech party has been over, evident from the series of layoffs by top players and several shutdowns in the past six months. After firing thousands of employees this year, the Byju’s group is now laying off 2,500 additional employees.

According to Byju’s, around 5% of its workforce is expected to be rationalised across product, content, media, and technology teams in a phased manner.

While the company said that the fresh layoffs are the result of redundancies and duplication of roles, experts tracking the edtech space see it as a cost cutting measure amid a challenging funding environment.

“As a mature organisation that takes its responsibility towards investors and stakeholders seriously, we aim to ensure sustainable growth alongside strong revenue growth,” Mrinal Mohit, CEO, Byju’s India business, said in a press statement. “These measures will help us achieve profitability in the defined time frame of March 2023.”

In the past three years, Byju’s has acquired over a dozen companies whose integration with its core business is now complete. Toppr, Meritnation, TutorVista, Scholar, and HashLearn, all of which operate in the K-12 business, are now consolidated under one umbrella, the statement added.

Its big ticket size acquisitions, Aakash Institute and Great Learning, will continue to function as separate entities. As a part of the cost cutting measure, the Bengaluru-based firm is also optimizing its marketing budget in India. 

The company also said that it plans to hire 10,000 more teachers in the coming year which would push its educator base to 30,000.

While Byju’s is targeting profitability in the ongoing fiscal year (FY23), the company incurred a loss of Rs 4,588 crore in FY21 with operating revenue of Rs 2,280 crore. The company claimed that it saw a significant jump in the topline during FY21 but because of revenue recognition changes, the growth will be reflected in FY22. It’s worth noting that it’s yet to file FY21 and FY22 numbers officially with the RoC.

As per data compiled by Fintrackr, edtech accounted for more than 30% of overall layoffs in the Indian startup ecosystem in 2022. The list include Byju’s (Toppr, WhiteHat Jr), Unacademy, Vedantu, LEAD, Eruditus, Invact Metaversity while a clutch of edtech startups such as Lido, Udayy, SuperLearn and Crejo.Fun shut their operations.