BW Communities

R.I.P LetsBuy!

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[LetsBuy woke up on Friday morning to empty warehouses, dropped shutters and employee-less offices. May 31 was officially the last day for everyone at the two-year-and-nine-month-old company, which was acquired by Flipkart in February 2012. On May 28, four HR executives from the Flipkart team accompanied by VP Business Development Vaibhav Pandey visited Letsbuy's Kirti Nagar warehouse in Delhi. Founders Binny and Sachin Bansal kept themselves away from the difficult job of announcing the shut down and so Pandey was handed over the task. By now it was certain Flipkart was all set to kill the Letsbuy brand – selling out on earlier promise of keeping the brand name alive. The only questions left unanswered were – by when and what will happen to the 450 LetsBuy employees?  (See Businessworld article <a href="http://www.businessworld.in/businessworld/businessworld/content/Its-Death-Takeover-for-Letsbuy.com.html">"It's death by takeover"</a> )  It was announced 31st May will be the official day for wrapping up all operations and hand over everything to Flipkart. For the first time Flipkart has officially accepted that it has brought down the shutters at LetsBuy offices and warehouses. "Yesterday was officially the last working day for LetsBuy. Some people will be there for fulfillment roles and some people will be called to work in teams like Finance etc," says Flipkart's VP Marketing Ravi Vora. Last Monday brought in some amount of distress among the LetsBuy employees. Employees present at the warehouse revealed that only a handful of them were given offers to join the Flipkart team. They suggested that some of the employees were offered jobs at 50 per cent cut while most were offered a month's severance and asked to quit. "Of the 50-55 people working in the Kirti Nagar warehouse, only three people will be joining Flipkart," says a senior officer at LetsBuy on condition of anonymity. "Out of the 400 odd employees, about 15–20 people have been offered jobs in Flipkart. Employees are furious and disheartened," he adds. However, Flipkart has a different story to tell. "Our first preference is to absorb the employees since we have constant requirement of an efficient workforce," says Vora. But he suggests that given the location constraints, Flipkart has struggled to absorb some people internally and thus it has helped them get a job in other organizations. Being headquartered in Bangalore, most of Flipkart's marketing, operations and HR team is based out of Delhi. However, LetsBuy is largely based in Delhi-NCR. "Of the overall workforce, 50-60 per cent of the employees have been placed either internally or have been helped with outplacement," Vora says. Vora says only in the cases where an employee did not match Flipkart's hiring criteria, was he offered a month's severance and offered full and final settlement before being asked to quit. However, through all this exercise, founders Hitesh Dhingra and Amanpreet Bajaj have preferred to remain quite.