eBay India Fires 100 Employees from Product & Tech Teams; Management Terms It ‘Benching’, Not Firing!
Under immense competition from marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart, eBay has decided to kill its entire tech and product team from their Bengaluru based development center.
As per various reports emerging, this recent layoffs concerned 30% of their employees in India; and since they have 350 employees, it means that 100 employees have been fired.
eBay hasn’t confirmed the number of employees who would be fired.
Interestingly, eBay India Latif Nathani has termed this as ‘benching’, rather than ‘firing’.
A statement from eBay said, “As a normal course of business, eBay regularly reviews its operational structure and today we announced some changes to our global product and technology team. As a result, we are reducing our overall technology workforce in Bangalore and shifting work to other global centers around the world,”
What Exactly Has Happened?
Inside India, there are mainly two divisions: One in Mumbai, which manages the marketplace product and another one in Bengaluru, which has two sub-divisions: core product & development and analytics.
Analytics division hasn’t been changed, but the entire team of core product & development has been terminated. Around 15 employees from this team would be relocated to US, while 30% of the development team have been shown the pink slips.
Interestingly, another set of reports informs us that except the 15 employees who would be relocated to US, the work of the rest of the development team has been re-assigned to another global location.
Now, eBay’s Bengaluru development center would only focus on creating products & features for eBay India.
The statement further said, “We remain committed to India and will continue to invest in core product and technology development for eBay India.’’
After Twitter fired its entire development team based in Bengaluru in September this year, this is the biggest termination of techies from Bengaluru.
eBay’s Indian development division was primarily focussed on developing features for their marketplace which involved creating a platform for buyers and sellers and enable them to hold auctions. However, it seems that their marketplace expansion is not happening as Amazon and Flipkart are rapidly expanding their market.
Ebay has clarified that these firings doesn’t mean that they are closing down their technology team. In fact, they are soon going to hire as well.
The spokesperson also added: ‘’That doesn’t mean that we are closing the technology team in India, instead the remaining employees will focus on eBay India related development, and we will hire more people.”
Last year, eBay had fired 2400 employees all over the world, which included 350 in India.
We will keep you updated as more details come in.
