Groupon is one of the leading companies in the daily deals and local commerce site. There is some significant shrinking i.e. laying down in the Groupon employees. The company has announced that it will lay off around 1,100 jobs mostly related to deal factory and customer service operations by taking pre-tax charge of $35 million. Cost savings from the cuts, will be reinvested in the business says Groupon.
Company is cutting down 1,100 jobs:
As part of the restructure, Groupon is also ceasing operations in several markets internationally in Morocco, Panama, The Philippines, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Thailand and Uruguay will all be closing. Before the closures, Groupon was active in over 40 countries. This laying down started recently in Turkey and Greece and a sell-off of a controlling stake in Groupon India to Sequoia.
“We believe that in order for our geographic footprint to be an even bigger advantage, we need to focus our energy and dollars on fewer countries,” COO Rich Williams noted in a blog post. “Substantially all of the pre-tax charges are expected to be paid in cash and will relate to employee severance and compensation benefits, with an immaterial amount of the charges relating to asset impairments and other exit costs.”
The short statement Groupon has filed with the SEC notes that between $22 million and $24 million of the charges will come in Q3 2015, and that the full restructure should be completed by September 2016. For the past several years, Groupon has been on a long-term mission to rebalance its strategy from a focus on daily deals to a more diverse business based around local commerce.
“Just as our business has evolved from a largely hand-managed daily deal site to a true e-commerce technology platform, our operational model has to evolve,” the COO Rich Williams wrote in his blog post.