The layoff saga continues to haunt the Indian start-up ecosystem as the e-commerce company Meesho has fired 251 employees in an attempt to maintain sustainability in its business operations. The company informed its employees about the layoff inside a town hall, this morning. 

“We have taken a difficult decision to part ways with 251 Meeshoites constituting 15% of the employee base, as we look to work with a leaner organisational structure to achieve sustained profitability,” the company said in a statement. 

According to a report by the Economic Times (ET), Vidit Aatrey, the co-founder and CEO of Meesho said that the company made some judgment errors in terms of hiring staff. In an internal note to employees, he said, “At the same time, we could have run our org structure in a more effective and lean manner overall. Our spans and layers were inflated, and this could have unintended consequences on our speed to execute. While we are confident that Meesho's business will stay strong, the economic reality is here to stay. We are now faced with the hard truth of aligning our people costs with the new projections for our business.”

“I want to reiterate that the decision around who is impacted has nothing to do with performance, and only to do with our business reality. That we are losing the best, hard-working talent as a result of this decision is not lost on me,” he also added.

The company is backed by the Masayoshi Son-led Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. 

This is Meesho’s second round of layoffs, after it fired 150 employees to restructure its Farmiso grocery business last year.