Grab, the ride-hailing and food-delivery app, announced that it was letting go of 1,000 people, in light of a rapidly changing industry, and in an effort to manage costs. Its CEO, Anthony Tan, described his decision to do as a “painful but necessary” move.

The announcement of the layoffs was made via a letter sent to employees. Tan wanted his staff to know that the cuts, which amount to 11% of its workforce, were a measured response and not a “shortcut to profitability”. “Change has never been this fast. Technology such as generative AI is evolving at breakneck speed. The cost of capital has gone up, directly impacting the competitive landscape,” Tan said in the letter. To be clear, the layoff isn’t limited to just folks within Singapore, with the company telling us that it is affecting all its offices globally.

For insight, Grab reportedly a quarterly loss of US$250 million (~RM1.16 billion) in May. However, the company also said that its revenue for the first quarter of this year rose to US$525 million (~RM2.44 billion), marking a 130.3% rise from its revenue from a year ago.

Grab first came onto the scene back in 2012, when it then began to slowly and persistently muscle out the then dominant ride-sharing app, Uber. Fast forward to today, the app is now the dominant choice of app for ride-hailing in eight Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Grab’s layoffs isn’t the first time a company had to do in order to restructure, nor is it the first ride-sharing app to do so. Just last year, its Indonesia-based rival and owner of GoJek, GoTo, underwent strict cost-cutting measures that resulted in it letting go of 12% of its workforce. Then, in March of this year, the company laid off a further 600 staff.

(Source: SCMP, Al-Jazeera)

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