Grab Is Laying Off 1,000 Employees Of Its Total Workforce
The announcement comes months after Grab said it had no plans for mass layoffs.
By Sadho Ram — 21 Jun 2023, 12:17 PM
Grab is cutting 1,000 jobs, its chief executive officer (CEO) Anthony Tan said in a letter sent to employees late on Tuesday, 20 June
The move will affect about 11% of its total workforce.
It's not clear if the job cut affects Grab employees globally. The company operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The layoff announcement comes months after the ride-hailing and food-delivery app said it had no plans for mass layoffs. Grab's last job cuts were in 2020, when 360 people, or 5% of its then-workforce, were laid off, citing the economic impact due to the pandemic.
The Singapore-based company had 11,934 staff as of the end of 2022, including about 2,000 from its acquisition of grocery chain Jaya Grocer last year, according to its latest annual report.
In the letter, Tan said the cuts were not "a shortcut to profitability" but a strategic reorganisation to adapt to the business environment
"I want to be clear that we are not doing this as a shortcut to profitability," Tan wrote, while calling the "restructuring" a "painful but necessary step".
"Change has never been this fast. Technology such as Generative AI (artificial intelligence) is evolving at breakneck speed. The cost of capital has gone up, directly impacting the competitive landscape. We must combine our scale with nimble execution and cost leadership, so that we can sustainably offer even more affordable services and deepen our penetration of the masses," he wrote in the letter, according to Reuters.
"The primary goal of this exercise is to strategically reorganise ourselves so that we can move faster, work smarter, and rebalance our resources across our portfolio in line with our longer-term strategies," he added.
The company is on track to break even this year even without the layoffs, Tan said.
