Zalora Indonesia, one of the fastest growing fashion e-commerce sites in the country, a few days ago laid off more than 10% of its workforce in its Jakarta office. Most of the people who got laid off were from its merchandising team which according to some sources are “growing too aggressive” that they had to cut some of the under-performing team members.
A number of analysts were not surprised to hear about this layoff, stating that it has been happening in Zalora offices across Southeast Asia and that the layoff in Indonesia had been totally predictable. Nevertheless, an insider rejects the notion of a “structured” or “planned” layoff by the company and stated that the company hired too fast that they ignore the quality of people who got hired, hence the firing of those under-performed people.
Analysts such as SGE’s Bernard Leong predicted that Rocket Internet will “execute” their method of hiring people while figuring out the perfect workflow and organization scheme that works and fire the rest of the people who don’t fit into the efficiently trimmed organization scheme. Some people even said that Rocket Internet is in the business of creating impressive looking companies on paper to sell or take public (IPO), while everything else is secondary.
Even after raising over $26 million from JP Morgan and Tengelmann, Zalora seems to have difficulties with its SEA operations. TechCrunch and e27 reported that their Taiwan operations might be shutting down although a company representative later rejected the claim stating that Zalora Taiwan is “to conduct a review to make changes”. Its Taiwanese operations is now handled by its Singaporean office.
Zalora Vietnam, The Philippines, Taiwan and now its Indonesian operations are in trouble with good talents leaving the company, although no one is quite sure how big of a trouble the company is in.
