E-commerce platform Carousell lays off 110 employees

NEW DELHI: Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce platform Carousell has laid off about 110 employees, or 10 per cent of its total workforce, in an effort to reduce costs.

Siu Rui Quek, co-founder and CEO of Carousell, said that he takes responsibility for the "decisions that have led us here".

The Singapore-headquartered company operates in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

"Emails will be sent to everyone in affected business units, clarifying if your role was impacted," he said in a statement.

"Parting with teammates, whom we are grateful to for joining us on this mission, is a very difficult decision. We will be sure to treat everyone impacted with compassion and to lend as much support as we can to them," said the CEO.

The company will offer 1 month of salary for every year of service, rounded up to the nearest half year, to each impacted employee.

"We will ensure that every impacted teammate will have at least 3 months of compensation, topping-up the difference where necessary," said Quek.

The CEO said as we emerged from the Covid lockdowns of 2021 across key markets of the group, "we were optimistic about the recovery to come and eager to reignite growth in our core classifieds business".

"Looking back, I'd made critical mistakes: First, I was too optimistic about the pace of our impact versus our increase in investments. Second, while it is easy to blame market conditions, I also underestimated the impact of growing our team size too quickly," he admitted.