GudangAda, a marketplace for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) wholesalers and retailers in Indonesia, has laid off at least 25 of its employees, according to a LinkedIn post shared by a human resource staff of the company. GudangAda previously said it has a total of 350 employees.
GudangAda says that the staff is no longer with the company, so her post and actions are purely personal and do not represent the firm.
The post on LinkedIn contains a document with details of the affected employees, including their email addresses, phone numbers, and links to their LinkedIn profiles, to help them find new opportunities.
“This period of time is definitely difficult for companies and talents. Unfortunately, GudangAda also needs to let go of several of their tech and product talents,” she wrote in the initial post.
A GudangAda representative told Tech in Asia that the lay off was purely due to individual performance issues, such as performance gap or a skill-set misfit given its current focus. “We view it as normal attrition in a fast-growth company like us,” he said.
He assured that the company has reached a peaceful settlement with everyone that was laid off and that the exercise was fully compliant with government regulations.
“As we continue to upskill our teams, we [still] have ongoing openings posted for tech, product, salesforce, and more,” the representative said.
The development comes after the company recruited former executives at Indonesian fashion app Sorabel and food logisitics startup Stoqo to be its new vice president of product and vice president of engineering, respectively. Both Sorabel and Stoqo are startups in Alpha JWC Ventures’ portfolio that had been severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Alpha JWC Ventures is also GudangAda’s investor.
As recently as last month, the startup was still actively looking for offline salespeople in more than a dozen cities in Indonesia.
GudangAda made the headlines earlier this year as it raised more than US$35 million over two investment rounds in only two months. It counts prominent investors such as Sequoia India, Pavilion Capital, Alpha JWC Ventures, and Wavemaker Partners as its backers.
Despite starting only at the end of 2018, it says it has already processed US$1 billion in transactions in the past 12 months, even as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the country. The company also says that it has acquired 80,000 big retailers and almost all of the FMCG wholesalers – around 20,000 of them – in Indonesia.
Editing by Terence Lee and Charmaine de Lazo
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