American-commerce giant Ebay is reducing its workforce in India. The Indian entity, Ebay India Pvt Ltd, which is operating in India since 2002, has laid-off the entire team in its Bengaluru development centre, which has mostly engineers and data analytics professionals.
Commenting on the lay-offs, an Ebay spokesperson told Business Line that, "As a normal course of business, Ebay regularly reviews its operational structure and today we announced some changes to our global product and technology team. As a result, we are reducing our overall technology workforce in Bangalore and shifting work to other global centers around the world. eBay’s Bangalore Centre will now focus on Ebay India-dedicated product and development work."
However, the company declined to give out the exact number of workforce that has been impacted with this decision. However, sources said that there could be about 100 engineers in the Bengaluru centre.
He further added that the company remains committed to India and would continue to invest in core product and technology development for this market. The Bangalore centre used to work for the global team and not involved with the Indian operations, sources said.
The news of layoffs comes in a year after Ebay went through a restructuring process post its separation from payment gateway PayPal. It had then announced that the company would be reducing its overall workforce globally.
Ebay India, which entered the Indian market much before Amazon and the existence of Flipkart and Snapdeal, has been facing stiff competition from rivals. Even as its sales are under pressure, the rivals are all witnessing double digit growth, say experts.
According to documents available with the Registrar of Companies (RoC), eBay’s revenue grew 23% to Rs.132.10 crore in FY15. Its revenue had grown 33% to Rs.107.60 crore in FY14 from Rs.81 crore the year before.