Reliance, India’s largest conglomerate, reduced its workforce by 11%, or more than 42,000 people, in the financial year ended March 2024.
The conglomerate also slowed hiring, bringing on board about 171,000 people in the financial year, lower than the around 263,000 people it hired a year earlier, according to its annual report. The company said more than 143,000 employees opted for “voluntary separations.”
Reliance employs a large workforce at its various businesses, which range from India’s largest retail chain to the country’s top telecom network. Reliance Retail accounts for the majority of personnel among the company’s verticals, with about 207,000 employees at the end of the financial year, but that number was lower than its previous headcount of about 246,000 a year earlier. “The retail industry typically has a high employee turnover rate, especially in store operations,” the company wrote.
The layoffs come as Reliance Retail, which raised $1.85 billion at a $100 billion valuation last year, is seeing revenue growth slow down. The unit reported a modest 7% increase in revenue in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, falling significantly short of the 15%-20% increase analysts had expected. Reliance Retail also opened only 82 new stores in the quarter, a sharp decline from the average of 740 stores per quarter in fiscal year 2023.
India’s top three IT services companies, TCS, Wipro and Infosys, slashed more than 63,750 jobs in the last financial year, reflecting wider global trends.
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