The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Indian technology services firms may lay off between 80,000 to 120,000 lakh people over the next two quarters, a news report said, quoting HR sources.
“Tech firms went into a hiring binge during the pandemic; now they have excess staff,” B.S. Murthy, chief executive of Leadership Capital, a CXO recruitment firm, told the Hindu.
“The industry may lay off anywhere between 80,000 to 120,000 people over the next two quarters,” he said.
According to the HR head of a large Indian IT services firm, who spoke on condition of anonymity, several HR officials are now in the process of making a list of ‘dispensable’ employees in India. “There’s a fear of a large number of layoffs,” the HR head told the newspaper.
Kamal Karanth, co-founder, Xpheno, a specialist staffing company, told the daily that there’s a reason for worry when large tech firms with ‘loads of cash’ lay off people in thousands.
According to Business Today, there are five reasons why companies are laying off employees: over-hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic; investors are pushing the company management to counter slowdown in growth in the firms; negative cash flows and dismal earnings; companies are anticipating a recession; and the tech sector is maturing.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said “copycat behavior” is the reason why so many companies are laying large numbers of their workforce off. However, layoffs don’t work to improve a company’s performance, he added.
Over the past two years, more than 30,000 people lost their jobs in India in the tech sector, Mint reported.
In January so far, Indian startups, including Dunzo, Sharechat, Rebel Foods, Captain Fresh, BharatAgri, Ola, DeHaat, Skit.ai, Coin DCX, LEAD School, Bounce, Cashfree have laid off several hundred employees.
Google-backed Dunzo laid off 3% of its staff, or around 90 people, on January 16. Last year in January, Economic Times had reported that the startup had raised $240 million from Reliance Retail. Sharechat laid off over 500 employees this month. Rebel Foods fired close to 2% of its 2,500 workforce.
Ola laid off about 130-200 employees in January. Cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX fired about 80-100 employees.
As per a Crunchbase News tally, more than 46,000 workers in US-based tech companies have been laid off in mass job cuts so far in 2023.
Google last week announced it’s in the process of laying off 12,000 employees. Amazon is reported to be selling some if its US offices after laying off 18,000 employees in the financial year 2023. Of this, 1,000 staff will be laid off in India, the Economic Times reported.
Meta laid off over 11,000 employees in early November, reducing its workforce by 13%. It has also frozen hiring employees through the first quarter of 2023. Twitter, which fired half of its workforce after Elon Musk took over as the chief executive, has announced more job cuts this year.
IBM fired 3,900 employees. SAP is cutting almost 3,000 jobs. Salesforce is laying off about 8,000 employees, including in India. Spotify Technology said it is reducing its workforce by about 6%, which translates to about 588 jobs. Intel Corp. is slashing hundreds of jobs in Silicon Valley. Microsoft plans to cut about 10,000 positions. Coinbase announced 950 job cuts in an attempt to cut costs.
Note: This article has been edited to reflect that Dunzo had raised $240 million in 2022, not 2023.