Uber is set to shut down its headquarters in Singapore as part of its business resizing exercise to globally wind down 45 offices and lay off 3,000 more employees.
“Over the next 12 months, we will begin the process of winding down our Singapore office and moving to a new APAC hub in a market where we operate our services,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in an email to employees on Monday, reports Tech in Asia.
He did not, however, specify the new market which they were supposedly moving to.
Uber opened its Singapore office in 2019 to oversee operations in nine countries. The office had 165 employees at the time, according to one account.
According to an earlier report, Uber will lay off 700 staff in India, where it has 2,000 workers employed. The company said that it is downsizing its total headcount by 14% or about 3,700 employees earlier this month.
Khosrowshahi added that Uber is also shutting down an office in San Francisco, moving some of the employees to a new headquarter in the city.
The letter stated that affected employees will be provided with severance packages, including healthcare coverage.
The company will be reducing investments in non-core projects and winding down its Incubator and AI Labs initiatives as part of its efforts to weather the coronavirus pandemic, said the chief executive.
He stated that the company has seen a 80% fall in its ride-hailing business, which is its main profit driver, amidst the crisis. However, he noted that UberEats is “doing great.”
“I will caution that while Eats growth is accelerating, the business today doesn’t come close to covering our expenses,” said the CEO.
Khosrowshahi said that “hope is not a strategy” and that the company has to take “hard actions” to secure its future.
“I will not make any claims with absolute certainty regarding our future,” he wrote. “I will tell you, however, that we are making really, really hard choices now, so that we can say our goodbyes, have as much clarity as we can, move forward, and start to build again with confidence.”
