The AskMe Group* has moved around 300 of its employees to its partner organisations, the company’s group head for marketing and communication for India and Malaysia Manav Sethi told MediaNama. Sethi added, “There are no layoffs, at the end of every year we take a hard look at the functions, skills and capabilities that we don’t need to keep on our payroll. We’ve done that exercise and moved those skills, capabilities and functions from our payroll to our partners. We had a big copywriting team, creative team, which is all commodity function. So we moved them to our partners whose cost structures are much lower than ours.” Last week, MediaNama had reached out to company to confirm if it had laid off any employees as cited by this BGR report. The company issued a statement which said, “It's the beginning of the new fiscal year and we continue to increase our productivity across functions through automation and better processes as in previous years. We continue to hire talent where required.” A Business Standard report pegged the affected employees at 650, adding that the company was burning $6 million monthly, employee appraisals were delayed and that some were told they’d be moved to other jobs within or outside the company. AskMe Grocery expansion: Last week, the AskMe Group said that it had plans to expand its Askme Grocery business from its current 38 cities to 80 cities by this financial year. It claimed to make 20,000 deliveries every day, and plans…
