Byju's founder says sorry to staff for layoffs

BENGALURU:: Byju's founder Byju Raveendran, in an email to employees, has sought forgiveness for the manner in which the company has had to lay off staff, and reiterated that the number affected is not more than 5% of the total strength of 50,000. Raveendran said, “I am truly sorry for those who have to leave Byju’s. You are not just a name to me. You are not a number. You are not just five percent of my company. You are five percent of me,” he said. “I seek your forgiveness if this process is not as smooth as we had intended it to be. We want to finish this process smoothly and efficiently. We don’t want to rush through it. So, we are informing all the affected team members individually with the dignity, empathy and patience they deserve. I want to emphasise that the overall job cuts are not more than five percent of our total strength.”Raveendran said that there is a huge price the learning platform has to pay to become profitable. The layoffs, he said, were to avoid role duplications. “We are working hard towards achieving profitability at the group level in this financial year itself. Our business has substantial economies of scale and unit economics which we believe we can leverage to achieve this mandate. However, our rapid organic and inorganic growth has created some inefficiencies, redundancies, and duplication within our organisation, that we need to rationalise to realise this,” he said in the email.The company suffered a surge in losses in the year 2020-21 that has pushed the company to take cost cutting measures, including reduction in marketing spends. Raveendran said the company had expanded quickly and massively across the world in the last four years, “Then 2022 happened. This is the year when many adverse macroeconomic factors changed the business landscape. Some business decisions have to be taken to protect the health of the larger organisation to pay heed to the constraints imposed by external macroeconomic conditions,” he said.