Snapdeal plans to cut monthly salary bill by 60%

E-commerce firm Snapdeal — which started laying off employees this month as part of its retrenching exercise — plans to reduce its monthly salary outgo to Rs 20 crore from about Rs 48 crore.

The retrenchment could see over 2,500 of 4,300-odd employees losing their jobs, people privy to the developments at Snapdeal told Moneycontrol. A majority of the people who are being let go include senior directors, directors and manager level employees.

"Every team head has been asked to downsize his team by 40-50 percent. The aim is to become unit economics positive by March," said an executive close to Snapdeal's top management.

Senior executives have also been asked to volunteer for pay cuts, one of the people mentioned above said.

Since its inception in 2010, the e-commerce firm has raised USD 1.75 billion from investors such as SoftBank, Kalaari Capital, Temasek, Alibaba Group, eBay and others.

Following SoftBank's deferral of funds, Snapdeal is putting in place cost-cutting measures including lay offs. 

In an email sent to the employees on Wednesday, founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal said they will take 100 percent salary cut in order to drive Snapdeal towards a profitable growth.In an emailed response to Moneycontrol's questionnaire, a Snapdeal spokesperson said: "Several reports about job cuts at Snapdeal present an exaggerated estimate of impact at Snapdeal and are largely speculative in nature. They portray a distorted interpretation of our on-going efforts in pursuit of our well-established goals of efficiency, experience and growth." "As in the past, and like all good companies do, we continue to assess resource allocation in furtherance of our goals of enhancing customer and seller experience while driving high-quality growth," the spokesperson said in the response.