Mobile Premier League (MPL) fires 100 employees, shuts operations in Indonesia

Indian mobile e-Sports gaming platform start-up Mobile Premier League (MPL) has laid off 100 employees. The company is the latest entrant in the growing line of startups that are shedding employees as the economy moves into crisis mode. Additionally, the online gaming company will be exiting the Indonesian market due to poor growth. The company gained prominence earlier due to mobile games, daily fantasy sports, quizzing, and board games. It allows users to participate and compete with each other in over 60 games.

An internal email was spotted which was sent by MPL co-founders Sai Srinivas and Shubh Malhotra to justify the move. In the email, the executives claimed that the current business metrics “do not justify further investments into this unit”.

MPL was founded in 2018, and it hosts hundreds of millions of tournaments a month and is trusted by over 90 million registered users across India, Indonesia, Europe and the US.

“We have made the decision to wind down our Indonesia operations and shut down the streaming product on the MPL app. We have invested significant resources and capital over the last three years into our Indonesian operations,” said the co-founders.

“However, the return profile of Indonesia is several multiples lower than what we were and are seeing in India, or even in our nascent US business,” they added. The employees that have been laid off will reportedly be given severance pay as well as other benefits.

“We are one of the few Internet companies which, within four years of inception, will cross $100 million of annual net revenue globally. On a gross revenue basis, we will be at $220-250 million in the year ending March 2023. In fact, we have a massively growing market ahead of us, but in order to capture it, we need to be willing to operate more efficiently today,” the co-founders said in the internal email.

“The last few months have been insane. The philosophy of growth at all costs is now reversed. The market is now rewarding profitable growth over growth at all costs. It is imperative that we as a company respond to these changes and respond fast,” they noted.

Another startup Frontrow also laid off 145 employees. The EdTech company joins many other prominent names in its industry to take the harsh step of laying off employees. The strength of 145 employees constitute 30 percent of the total workforce of the company.

Frontrow founder Ishaan Preet Singh said, “As we’ve scaled our business over the last year, we had invested heavily in growth, particularly as we’ve been creating a new category.” He added that the layoffs were done in order to “ensure that we achieve that goal over the next decades and that we have over 24 months of runway to keep iterating and improving on our core business, we had to take a few difficult prioritisation decisions over the past few weeks.”

Specific reasons may vary but the layoffs come at a time when there’s economic turbulence across the globe.

With inputs from IANS

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