Byju's To Fire 2500 Employees, Aims For Profitability By March 2023
According to Divya Gokulnath, co-founder of Byju's, the company will start focusing on establishing its brand recognition abroad through new partnerships and by hiring 10,000 teachers for both its Indian and international businesses.
Byju's, a significant player in Edtech, has devised a strategy to cut costs in its marketing and operations to achieve profitability by March 2023. As a result, 2,500 employees, or 5% of its workforce, would lose their jobs over the next six months.
According to Divya Gokulnath, co-founder of Byju's, the company will start focusing on establishing its brand recognition abroad through new partnerships and by hiring 10,000 teachers for both its Indian and international businesses.
"We have designed a path to profitability which we plan to achieve by March 2023. We have built significant brand awareness throughout India, and there is scope to optimize the marketing budget and prioritize the spending in a way that creates a global footprint. Second is operational cost, and the third is integrating multiple business units," Gokulnath said.
She said that the K10 subsidiaries〞Meritnation, TutorVista, Scholar, and HashLearn〞will now be consolidated as one business unit under the India business.
Aakash and Great Learning will continue to function as separate organizations.
"This (the new plan) will help us enhance efficiency and avoid redundancy. So there will be a rationalization of roles as well. Our hybrid teaching model, tuition center, and online teaching model, which is Byju's Classes or our learning app, are scaling very well. Especially for our first two products, we plan to hire 10,000 teachers. Our revenues will be on track as per what we are doing," Gokulnath said.
She stated that approximately 5% of Byju's 50,000 employees are planned to be streamlined across the product, content, media, and technology teams to reduce redundancies and duplicate responsibilities and to fully utilize technology.
"Around half of the new hiring will occur in India in the next six months. We will hire in the English and Spanish-speaking markets. Teachers will be from the US and India. We are also looking at expanding to Latin America," Gokulnath said.
She said it would leverage partnerships with brands like Fifa, and the new partnership will focus on conveying the value addition that the company does in terms of learning.
Byju's booked a loss of Rs 4,588 crore for the fiscal year that ended March 31, 2021, 19 times more than the preceding fiscal year. On Wednesday, the nation's most valuable startup released audited financial statements after months of delay.
The losses increased in the 2020每21 fiscal year from Rs 231.69 crore in 2019每20. FY21 fell from Rs 2,511 crore in FY20 to Rs 2,428 crore.
However, the company announced a four-fold increase in revenue to Rs 10,000 crore in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, although it did not provide earnings or loss statistics for that time.
(With PTI inputs)
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