At a time when the global economies, including India, are on upswing and e-commerce is driving the growth with promise to create thousands of jobs over the next few years, global online marketplace eBay has laid off over 2,400 staff across the world, of which 350 are in India. 

This, the San Jose-based e-commerce company said, is part of its massive restructuring that will split the company into two major divisions — eBay Marketplaces and payment division PayPal by mid this year.

More layoffs

The Nasdaq-listed company has in an analyst call mentioned that it is looking to spin off a third division, eBay Enterprises, which runs e-commerce operations for other companies. This signals another round of layoffs in the coming months. 

"As part of the job cuts, employees in India across eBay Marketplaces and PayPal were impacted as well," the company said in a statement.

eBay total headcount globally was about 36,000, while its competitor and e-commerce giant Amazon has over one lakh employees across the globe.

Chinese Internet firm Alibaba employs over 22,000 and is much younger company compared to eBay.

Meanwhile, Singapore-headquartered Flipkart, a 10-year-old company, with operations only in India has crossed 13,000 employee strength as on June 2014. 

According to industry watchers, compared to its competitors, eBay's revenues have been slackening due to weak holiday sales in major markets due to its inability to attract repeat customers.

Experts also believe that eBay was not quick enough to gauge the customer behaviour or anticipate the rapid  growth in developing markets like India, which is expected to witnesses an exponential growth from a mere a $4 billion at present to $60 billion by 2020.

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