Skift Take
Those unbelievable expansion numbers that Ritesh Agarwal used to rattle off? We won’t be hearing them again in 2020. The Oyo founder is forced to think of business sustainability. Let’s see if he’s adept at it.
Oyo’s founder Ritesh Agarwal on Monday sent an internal note to all its India employees confirming rumors that surfaced recently that the budget hotel chain was laying off staff.
He also offered a new roadmap for the embattled company for 2020 and beyond. The priorities outlined are telling on where Oyo has gone wrong, and beg the question: Will this go down as a dark chapter in Oyo’s history, or will Oyo be history?
The note did not say how many staff would be let go, but an Oyo insider told Skift “at the moment it would be over 1,000 in India, 600 in China, and very few in other markets.”
Oyo employs some 10,000 staff in India, its biggest revenue-generating country, and 12,000 employees in China, its second biggest market.
“The actual details are still being discussed,” said the insider, adding that the redundancies are “in progress.”
Oyo’s spokesperson declined to comment when approached by Skift.
In his note, Agarwal admitted that “growing at the pace at which Oyo has in the past few years, we sometimes went ahead of ourselves.”
“This year we are taking steps to address it,” he said.
“One of the implications of the new strategic objectives for 2020, is that, like the leadership team, we wi
