ShareChat lays off 20% of its workforce to sustain through headwinds

Amid mass layoffs across sectors, the Social Media platform ShareChat confirms firing about 500 employees to sustain difficult times.

Sharechat, a home-grown social media platform that gained attention for providing a range of regional languages, has laid off around 20% of its workforce. This amounts to close to 500 employees getting fired. 

In a statement shared by the platform, the spokesperson stated that this decision was made to prepare the company to sustain through massive obstacles like external macro factors that impact the cost and availability of capital. 

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The statement also stated that the startup’s decision to reduce employee costs was taken after much deliberation and in light of the growing market consensus. This note and the news of the sudden layoffs were initially covered by Economic Times.

The spokesperson claimed that over the last six months, the platform has aggressively optimised costs across the board, including in marketing and infrastructure, among other cost heads and ramped up monetisation efforts.

The affected employees will be given a pay-out for the notice period and two weeks' pay as ex gratia for every year they served the startup. Additionally, the employees will also get 100% of variable pay until December 2022 and their health insurance policy coverage will remain until the end of June

The startup will also let the ESOPs of its affected employees continue to vest per their schedule up until April 30.