Singapore’s ride-hailing company Grab is cutting about 1,000 jobs, or about 11 percent of its workforce. This is the biggest round of job layoffs by the Southeast Asian tech giant since the pandemic, when it laid off about 360 employees in 2020.
Grab CEO Anthony Tan said the layoffs were not a “shortcut to profits” but part of a fundamental shift in the company’s operating model and cost structure. He described the decision to lay off around 1,000 employees as a ‘painful but necessary step’.
In a letter to Grab staff, Tan wrote, “I want to be clear that we are not doing this as a shortcut to profitability. Over the past couple of years we’ve been consistent in managing costs tightly in all areas of our operations and on improving platform efficiency”