Youzan was exposed to large layoffs: the number of people involved exceeded 1500, mainly technology development posts

Reporter | She Xiaochen

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On January 20, according to a number of media reports, Youzan recently launched a round of major layoffs, involving more than 1,500 people, and the laid off positions included product and technology research and development.

Previously, some netizens broke the news on the pulse of the social platform that Youzan wrote "personnel optimization" into the OKR in 2022: the overall number of people outside the direct front-line sales decreased by a certain proportion throughout the year, optimized the target management and iteration mechanism to ensure the energy on the core goal, reduced the collaboration chain and functional modules, and ensured the action and collaboration efficiency.

In addition, according to Sina Technology, Youzan vice president Chen Jinhui has left in October 2021. According to public information, Chen Jinhui joined Youzan in 2017 and was once the vice president of Baidu Takeaway.

In response to the above-mentioned layoff news, Interface News asked youzan for verification from the official, and there was no response as of press time. But a person familiar with the matter told Interface News that most of the employees involved in this round of layoffs are indeed technology development positions.

According to Youzan's latest financial report, as of September 30, 2021, Youzan employed a total of 4358 employees, accounting for nearly 40% of technology and product developers. Its research and development expenditure in the first three quarters of last year reached 480 million yuan, an increase of 50% year-on-year.

In terms of revenue, Youzan achieved revenue of 1.176 billion yuan in the first three quarters of last year, down 9.9% year-on-year; operating loss was 759 million yuan, an increase of 113% from 356 million yuan in the same period last year.

Youzan's revenue is mainly composed of subscription solutions and merchant solutions revenue. Last year, Youzan announced that it would independently turn "Youzan New Retail" into a new business brand, and also created many benchmarking cases, but the overall growth was not rapid. In the first three quarters of 2021, the number of new paid merchants in Youzan was 32,700, of which the number of new paid merchants in the third quarter was 13,700, an increase of only 6% year-on-year.

The Kuaishou platform was once an extremely important growth engine. However, Youzan's financial report for the first half of 2021 shows that in the first half of 2021, Youzan GMV increased by only 4% year-on-year. In this regard, Yu Tao, CFO of Youzan, has said that the GMV in the first half of the year is not ideal, mainly due to the decline in GMV from the Kuaishou channel, and the proportion of GMV of the Kuaishou platform GMV in the whole fell to 20% in the first half of 2021.

In the capital market, Youzan has also experienced many ups and downs.

In 2018, Youzan had "backdoor listing". China Innovation Pay, a company listed on the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM) of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, acquired a 51% stake in Youzan by issuing shares for HK$2.096 billion, and Qima Holdings Ltd. is the parent company of Youzan Group. In June of that year, the abbreviation of China Innovation Payment was changed to China Youzan.

In addition, on 28 February 2021, Youzan issued an announcement that it had applied to the Stock Exchange for the listing of Youzan Technology shares on the main board of the Stock Exchange in the form of an introduction.

But the plan did not go smoothly. On December 22 last year, China Youzan issued an announcement that considering the progress of the listing application, it was impossible to complete the listing process of Youzan Technology and the privatization process of China Youzan Technology before the agreed date, so it was decided not to promote the privatization and the listing process of Youzan Technology. The company said that youzan technology's suspension of listing will not have any impact on China's operations; the company will evaluate other capital market strategies or choose opportunities to restart.