Ola Electric to cut 500 jobs by year-end for restructuring

Bengaluru: Electric vehicle (EV) major Ola Electric Mobility is in the process of shedding 500 employees by the end of this year, as part of its restructuring exercise, sources well-aware of the matter told DH on Thursday. The process is a long-term one that has been going on for several months, they said.

The sources explained that this was being done to optimise business efficiency across verticals, attain profitability, and to ensure there is no redundancy. Parallelly, the company is hiring new roles.

Ola has been in hot water for the past several months with the regulatory body Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) for thousands of unresolved customer complaints on the company’s products and services.

As reported earlier, CCPA cross checked a claim by the company that its has over 99 per cent of the consumer complaints, and found it to be false. It subsequently tasked the Bureau of Indian Standards to investigate the matter.

This is not the first time that Ola has undertaken such a restructuring exercise.

In April this year, another group company, Ola Consumer (formerly Ola Cabs) had announced plans to undertake a restructuring exercise that would affect over 10 per cent of its 1800-workforce.

At the same time, Hemant Bakshi, who was CEO of ANI Technologies, the parent company of ride-hailing service Ola Cabs, had also resigned after four months of stepping into the role.

Previously in January 2023, Ola Electric and Ola Cabs had terminated about 200 people.

In July 2022, the company gave the pink slip to almost 1,000 employees after shutting down three of its verticals to focus on its EV business, including food and grocery delivery and its cloud kitchen businesses. The firm had also announced plans to hire 800 employees for its EV operations, at the time.

On Thursday, Ola Electric’s (which became a listed company after its IPO in August) share price closed at Rs 67.24, down from the price the company had set during its August 2024 initial public offering (IPO), at Rs 72 to Rs 76 per share.

As per its IPO document, Ola Electric had 4,011 on-roll employees as of March 2024.

Ola Electric did not respond to queries made by DH till the time of publication.