Dubai-based Careem has laid off over 150 employees to cut down on costs due to financial constraints. The ride-hailing app’s co-founder and CEO Mudassir Sheikha in an interview confirmed the news and said “that cuts are being made to support its [the company’s] expansion strategy.”
He further added, “The expansion will require cost-cutting that will involve the loss of five percent of existing roles and the reassigning of ten percent of staff to more critical technology development areas.”
The layoffs come just three weeks after Uber completed $3.1 billion acquisition of Careem.
An employee who was laid off spoke to MENAbytes, a leading tech news company in the Middle East, and shared, “Careem was a fantastic company but things started deteriorating after the deal with Uber was announced. The uncertainty hiked since the acquisition but I didn’t see this coming. We could have been informed earlier. It would have given us more time to look for an alternative but nevertheless it has been a good journey.”
Another ex-employee remarked, “It is sad to see a company that used to have great culture and values, lose everything. It has become a highly political organisation where performance is not the criteria to progress anymore”.
Uber, that now owns Careem, has also laid off over 1,000 people from its different teams across the world in a bid to cut down on costs. According to stats, it lost approximately $1.1 billion in the third quarter of 2019.
