India’s Fastest Unicorn: Udaan Fires 2000 Employees During #Lockdown; 30 Days Salary Will Be Given

As per the reports, the startup Udaan has laid off over 2,000 contractual employees across different business roles such as sales, marketing, operations, and credit collection.

How Did This Happen?

Basically, the B2B commerce start-up Udaan is an online marketplace that facilitates buying and selling fashion products, groceries and electronics among manufacturers, brands and retailers. 

The first time, it was incorporated in June 2016 and since then, it has expanded its operations to 900 cities.

Further, the majority of the contractual employee base acted as ‘fleet-on-street’ for Udaan, helping the startup acquire buyers and suppliers in the Kirana store segment. 

Why Would This Happen?

Currently, the Bengaluru-based unicorn is currently also servicing orders relating to essential goods through their partners.

During the past month, Udaan has been facing a drop in business under their non-essential categories which includes electronics, kitchen accessories and others.

Unfortunately which also are high tickets in transactional value, as compared to essential goods.

The resources said “Internally, it is still uncertain when the economy will swing back to complete normalcy. There is also a fear that the country might go on to another extended lockdown, after May 3. It could also be that the country might open up the economy and announce another shutdown, later if the COVID-19 relating cases might continue, leading to Udaan taking steps to layoff employees,”.

Moreover, the company’s contractual employees in North India were the worst affected, said the first employee quoted above. 

Earlier, Udaan had hired several employees on contractual roles via human resource consulting firms, especially for ground operations.

What Does Udaan Say?

The Udaan spokesperson said “In this unprecedented breakout of coronavirus, we are adapting to the structural changes in demand in India which is impacting our current infrastructure. We are compelled to restructure our teams which have unfortunately made some roles redundant,”. 

Apart from this, Udaan said that each associate who has been impacted is provided with additional compensation of one month and will be part of the priority hiring list where they would be given preference to join Udaan when a relevant opportunity exists within the system. 

In addition to that, associates affected and who are covered under Udaan’s medical insurance scheme will continue to get medical insurance benefits for an additional period of 3 months.

The fleet-on-street and delivery personnel have been facing challenges over the past month, in terms of procuring necessary passes for movement and delivery of goods, which is adversely affecting their employment status.

Udaan is currently valued at around $3 billion was founded by former Flipkart executives Amod Malviya, Sujeet Kumar, and Vaibhav Gupta. 

So far, it has raised over $800 million from investors such as Tencent, Altimeter Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST Global, and others.