News: Indian startups like Grofers, Zomato start restoring salaries after pay cuts-20-07-2020

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/startups/newsbuzz/indian-startups-start-restoring-salaries-after-pay-cuts/articleshow/77057876.cms

Bengaluru | New Delhi: Some Indian internet companies like Grofers, Zomato, UpGrad, and Ixigo have begun rolling back the salary cuts eected during the lockdown.

Others like ecommerce platform Snapdeal, which are now operating at pre-Covid-19 levels, have rolled out increments and reinstated bonuses.

While the country’s economy has gradually begun to open up, albeit under a tight leash, the startups are beginning to reinstate the salaries that had been slashed in the April-June quarter. During that three-month period, a number of them had also issued additional employee stock options, in lieu of the salaries cut during the economic crisis. Grofers conrmed salary restoration to ET. “We had (earlier) been conservative because of the uncertainty in operations...

That seems to be stable now, so we reinstated salaries from July 1,” Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder of Grofers, told ET. The Gurgaon-headquartered online grocery delivery platform had furloughed about 50-70 employees in April. Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal’s July 10 blog post said original salaries have been restored,

while online travel operator Ixigo restored salaries to pre-cutback levels from July. “What we saw when the lockdown eased, and ights began to resume, initially there was pent up demand, and more than we anticipated. But as it began to settle, we saw demand would not go south of a particular level...From July, we decided to bring back salaries to the February level,” Aloke Bajpai, chief executive of Ixigo, said.