The ride-hailing giant Uber is making a second round of job cuts. An extra 3,000 jobs are to go; that’s in addition to the 3,700 announced earlier this month. The cuts in workforce are in reaction to the downturn in its core Rides business due to the global Covid-19 outbreak.
According to Reuters, Uber’s Chief Executive Officer, Dara Khosrowshahi, also announced the company would wind down its office in Singapore over the next 12 months and close down about 45 offices.
In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S., the company said it estimates that it will incur approximately $175 million to $220 million of charges. These estimated costs include approximately $110 million to $140 million related to severance and other termination benefits, and up to approximately $65 million to $80 million related to site closures.
In a statement, Khosrowshahi said: “Given the dramatic impact of the pandemic, and the unpredictable nature of any eventual recovery, we are concentrating our efforts on our core mobility and delivery platforms and resizing our company to match the realities of our business. That’s led us to some painful decisions today: we are stopping some of our non-core investments and reducing the size of our workforce by around 3,000 people, each of whom I want to personally thank for their contributions to Uber. As I said to our teams today, we are making these hard choices now so that we can move forward and begin to build again with confidence.”
The company is reportedly in talks with GrubHub Inc to expand its food delivery business. Earlier in May, the U.S. micro-mobility company Lime announced that it had acquired Uber’s JUMP’s business operations.
