News: Ola to restructure operations & downsize staff

C-Suite

Ola to restructure operations & downsize staff

As the ride hailing company prepares to go public in 18 to 20 months, it undergoes restructuring and aims to step up its governance and compliance processes.
Ola to restructure operations & downsize staff

With a broader reorganisation underway, a group of employees is being moved to adjacent businesses, including Ola Electric and Ola Financial Services. Further, the overall staff is planned to be reduced by 5-8 percent, which is expected to impact about 350 jobs.

Harish Abhichandani, Ola Group Chief Financial Officer said, "As a business, we need to exercise sharper focus on metrics like revenue, growth, and profitability. We also need to refresh the way we run our daily operations - processes, people, productivity. Hence, a redesign of our organization and processes is the need of the hour."

A lot has happened at ride hailing company, Ola, in the last one year.

In September, it raised Rs 35.9 crore from an investment fund named ‘ARK Ola Pre-IPO Private Investment Trust’ at a valuation of $6.3 Bn. Then about a few weeks back, Ola had spun off its financial services arm, Ola Money, to raise money for the unit separately. Ola Electric, one of the subsidiaries of, is already valued at close to $1 Bn after Japanese SoftBank’s recent investment.

The company has, in fact, diversified its core ride-hailing portfolio to include leasing and corporate subscription businesses as well as bike taxis to fuel growth. It even invested in Vogo, a bike rental startup.

Now as it prepares to go public in 18 to 20 months, it needs to streamline its business and redesign the organization structure to maximize the opportunities of going public. Ola, probably aims to minimize the risks of public market scrutiny its rival Uber has been under for its mounting losses after its Initial Public Offering.

“With a view to become more nimble and have a sharper focus on growth and profitability, we are redesigning the organization to build a structure that strengthens and leverages our local and global scale and enables faster decision making across all of Ola's group companies," said the company in a statement.

As part of its restructuring plan, Ola will continue to focus on consolidating some functions and also evaluate how technology can be leveraged to significantly transform processes that are currently largely manual.

How the company wide restructuring impacts about 4,500 people, employed by ANI Technologies, which owns and operates Ola, would be interesting to follow. As the company looks to leverage technology, the jobs which are repetitive are at highest risk.  

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Topics: C-Suite, #Jobs

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