A year ago, BlueStacks, an Android gaming platform for PCs and Macs, was highly bullish on the Indian market. As of 2021, the company had over 500 million users globally across more than 200 locations and crossed 1 billion downloads.
"India is an extremely large mobile gaming market for us. Last year, the pandemic drove a surge of gamers worldwide, including India. This saw a nearly 100 per cent jump in user base," Rosen Sharma, CEO of BlueStacks, told IANS last year.
However, not all seems to be hunky-dory at the start-up founded by Sharma, Jay Vaishnav, Harvinder Sawhney and Suman Saraf in 2011. The company has over 400 people in its global team and has decided to lay off 120 to 150 people.
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This includes close to 60 Indian employees. Ayushi Nautiyal, a QA engineer with the company, confirmed the mass layoff in her LinkedIn post. She had joined BlueStacks' technical team just three months ago.
Other Indian professionals who wrote about the firing on the networking platform include Affiliate Manager Arvind Kumar Yadav, UX Designer Rohit Arora, and Technical Engineer Shailesh Raghav. Their posts soon got the attention of a cross-section of tech-oriented companies and headhunting agencies. These include OLX Group, Viacom Media, Zest Money, Byju's, BizzTm Technology, and Increff Software, who asked those who lost their jobs at BlueStacks to check in with them individually.
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Bidding Adieu, Over A Call
BlueStacks, which has offices in New Delhi, London, Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing, conveyed its decision to lay off people during a video call this week. Employees across various departments were told about the termination of their services. Internal restructuring was the reason given behind the layoffs.
In a statement to a media company, BlueStacks' CHRO, Hue Harguindeguy, said that the company had doubled its workforce from 300 to 600 people over the
past two years. "With the changes in the macro-economy, we had to realign. We are currently working with the impacted employees to help them find new jobs and roles," she added.
As per data compiled by layoffs.fyi, 43,399 start-up employees were laid off worldwide across 342 companies between April 2022 to July 2022. Of these, 5,670, or over 13%, were fired by Indian start-ups. In FY 2021-22, 1,440 employees were laid off in Indian start-ups.
The edtech sector saw the maximum firing this year, with companies like Unacademy, Byju's and Vedantu laying off large tranches over the past few months. Unacademy has fired 1,150 people in two phases, Vedantu fired 624, Byju's -owned Toppr and Whitehat Jr fired around 350 and 300 people each layoffs.fyi claimed.
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