As Ola ramps up its hiring for the electric mobility business, the urban mobility firm is in the process of firing nearly 1,000 employees, according to Economic Times report.
As per earlier reports, the company was laying off around 400-500 employees, while the annual appraisals for many staff were yet to be formalized. However, the final figure for retrenchment can now touch about 1,000.
Ola has asked its employees, who are targeted for layoffs, to resign voluntarily. The company is delaying the appraisal process of several employees who the company wants to fire so that they resign.
The firm has been hiring across verticals, including mobility, hyperlocal, fintech, and its used cars businesses.
Ola’s restructuring exercise, which is expected to go on for a few more weeks, is taking place in a bid to shift focus towards the firm’s electric mobility business.
The company is hiring “aggressively” for the electric mobility business, and executives are engaged in the recruitment process. Recently, the SoftBank-backed mobility platform, shut down its used car business Ola Cars and quick commerce business Ola Dash to focus on its electric vehicle manufacturing business.
In 2020, it had laid off around 1,400 employees from its food, rides, and financial services verticals due to the COVID pandemic. In April 2022, Ola Dash scaled down its operations from 9 cities to 3 cities and dismissed over 2,100 contract workers.
The company is serving 250+ cities across India, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. The company app offers mobility solutions by connecting customers to drivers and a wide range of vehicles across bikes, auto-rickshaws, metered taxis, and cabs, enabling convenience and transparency for hundreds of millions of consumers and over 1.5 million driver-partners.
Ola’s core mobility offering in India is supplemented by its electric-vehicle arm, Ola Electric; India’s largest fleet management business, Ola Fleet Technologies and Ola Skilling aims to enable millions of livelihood opportunities for India’s youth.
Ola is planning to hire about 800 people for cars alone and additionally for cell development. The source said, “Even as they are letting go of people, there are more people coming in. It is a repurposing process for the company rather than a cost-cutting process.”
Ola Electric on July 18 said it has signed an agreement under the Centre’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme to manufacture advanced cells in India.
It said it is the only Indian electric mobility company selected by the Government of India under its ambitious Rs 80,000-crore cell PLI scheme, receiving a maximum capacity of 20-gigawatt hour (GWh) for its bid in March.
