Bad News! Byju's may lay off at least 2,500 employees soon

Edtech major Byju's has chalked out a plan to become profitable by March 2023 to optimise its marketing and operational cost, which will lead to retrenchment of 5 per cent employees or about 2,500 people in next six months.

Byju's co-founder Divya Gokulnath told PTI that the company will start focusing on building brand awareness overseas through new partnerships and hire 10,000 teachers for India and overseas business.

"We have designed a path to profitability which we plan to achieve by March 2023. We have built significant brand awareness throughout India and there is scope to optimise marketing budget and prioritise the spends in a way that it creates a global footprint. Second is operational cost and the third is integration of multiple business units," Gokulnath said.

She said that the K10 subsidiaries -- Meritnation, TutorVista, Scholar and HashLearn -- will now be consolidated as one business unit under India business.

Aakash and Great Learning will continue to function as separate organisations.

"This (the new plan) will help us enhance efficiency, avoid redundancy. So there will be rationalisation of roles as well. Our hybrid teaching model which is tuition centre and our online teaching model which is Byju's Classes or our learning app is scaling very well. Especially for our first two products, we plan to hire 10,000 teachers. Our revenues will be on track as per what we are doing," Gokulnath said.

She said that to avoid redundancies and duplication of roles, and by leveraging technology better, around five per cent of Byju's 50,000 workforce is expected to be rationalised across product, content, media and technology teams.

"Around half of the new hiring will take place in India in the next six months. We will hire in the English and Spanish speaking market. Teachers will be from the US and India. We are also looking at expanding to Latin America," Gokulnath said.

She said that it will leverage partnerships it has with brands like Fifa and the new partnership will focus on conveying value addition that the company does in terms of learning.

Byju's booked a loss of Rs 4,588 crore for fiscal year ended March 31, 2021, 19 times more than the preceding fiscal, as the nation's most valuable startup on Wednesday released audited financial statements after months of delay.

The losses in the 2020-21 fiscal widened from Rs 231.69 crore in 2019-20. Revenues during FY21 dropped to Rs 2,428 crore from Rs 2,511 crore in FY20.

But in the fiscal ending March 31, 2022, the company said revenue soared four-fold to Rs 10,000 crore but it did not reveal profit or loss numbers for that year.