Not so good news is coming from Ola. As per certain media reports, Ola plans to lay off around 500 employees from its software teams, especially the ones working on aspects related to the Ola app. The move comes after declining sales of Ola’s recently announced electric scooter, Ola S1 Pro.
Sources close to CNBC-TV18 have revealed that Ola plans to lay off nearly 500 employees from across software teams. The latest lay offs are likely to be a part of the company’s restructuring exercise that it has been carrying out for the last few months. The news of recent lay offs come amid falling sales of the company’s electric scooter — Ola S1 Pro scooter.
Ola hasn’t revealed anything concrete about the upcoming lay offs and how many employees it plans to fire. Commenting on the matter, an Ola Spokesperson just said, “Ola Electric, India’s largest EV company, has been increasing its focus on non-software engineering domains with a clear focus on building engineering and R&D capabilities across – vehicle, cell, battery, manufacturing and automation, autonomous engineering streams. The company currently has around 2,000 engineers and aims to increase its engineering talent pool to 5,000 over the next 18 months. In light of these efforts, the company is centralizing operations and is undertaking a restructuring exercise to minimise redundancy and build a strong lateral structure that strengthens relevant roles and functions”.
To recall, Ola recently laid off nearly 2000 employees responsible for its pre-owned car business, Ola Cars, and quick commerce business Ola Dash. Several top-level executives, including members of Bhavish Agarwal’s leadership team, have also quit in the last two years.
The tech industry is going through a tough time. Several big tech companies like Netflix, Microsoft, and many others have laid off hundreds of employees recently. Google has also warned its employees to be more productive or else get prepared for strict actions, which possibly hints at lay offs.
