Startup Digest: Bounce lays off 5% of staff: Report, HC on Ashneer Vs BharatPe: 'Parties can extend courtesy', Meta hires former Tata CLiQ CEO

Sequoia-backed bike rental and electric vehicle startup Bounce has laid off about 5 percent of its staff or around 40-50 employees to cut costs, according to a report by Moneycontrol.

The layoffs have affected employees across customer support, finance, and other segments. “The focus at Bounce is shifting to the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) business and the layoffs are to drive efficiency for the same,” an industry source told Moneycontrol.

This is the third round of layoffs at Bounce. The firm has about 500-700 employees in India, the report added.

The Delhi High Court has granted three weeks to former BharatPe chief Ashneer Grover and his wife Madhuri Jain Grover, to respond to an interim petition by the company.

“Three more weeks' time granted to the defendants to file their responses to the interim applicants. Written statements to be filed in response to the main suit as well,” the bench said.

The Delhi High Court has refused to gag Ashneer, but has nudged both sides to "extend courtesy". Delhi High Court’s Justice Navin Chawla while hearing the suit filed by BharatPe said that, “This social media has brought us down to this level. Ask him to maintain decorum."

The Delhi High Court bench also asked Grover’s counsel to advise Grover to stop speaking against the company’s professionals. During the hearing, the court was also informed of Jain's and other defendants' delays in filing their filings.

“The moment you start saying something against these officers of the company, you are defaming the company,” the bench said.

Paytm has disbursed 3.7 lakh crore loans during December 2022, implying a 117 percent growth from December 2021, according to the fintech company's regulatory filing.

For the October-December quarter, the cumulative loans grew by one crore, 11 percent, from the September quarter 2022.

This aggregates to loan disbursements of Rs 3,665 crore ($443 million, y-o-y growth of 330 percent). The total disbursements for the three months ended December 2022 stood at Rs 9,958 crore, seeing an increase of 357 on a year-on-year basis and 36 percent growth on a quarter-on-quarter basis.

In December, Paytm saw the highest consumer engagement on Paytm Super App. The average monthly transacting users for the quarter ended December 2022 was 85 million, up 32 percent from the quarter ended December 2021.

The total merchant gross merchandise value (GMV) processed through Paytm’s platform for the quarter ended December 2022 stood at Rs 3.46 Lakh Crore ($42 billion), growing 38 percent from the quarter ended December 2021.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore on Monday said integration of India's Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and equivalent network in Singapore, known as PayNow, will begin anytime soon, which in turn will reduce the remittance cost by 10 per cent. There will be interoperability of the two digital payment networks, allowing seamless remittances between the two countries at a highly competitive rate.

"Integration of UPI and Singapore's PayNow with India is ready and waiting for launch," Singapore central bank's chief fintech officer Sopnendu Mohanty said at the G20 meeting on financial inclusion at Kolkata.

"As of now, remittance to India is at least 1 billion Singapore Dollars and India to Singapore will be 200-300 million Singapore Dollars," Mohanty said.

Pramod Verma, chief architect of Aadhaar & India Stack said similar interoperability will also happen with Dubai and a few other countries soon. He said this integration will also help Indian tourists pay in Singapore using UPI.

Singapore already has such a tie-up with Indonesia's PromPay to facilitate seamless cross-border transfers.

Meta has announced Vikas Purohit as the Director of Global Business Group in India to lead the strategy and delivery of the charter that is focused on the country's largest advertisers and agency partners.

“Purohit will report to Arun Srinivas, Director and Head of Ads Business for Meta in India,” the company said in a statement.

Purohit will head Meta's work with India's largest businesses and the agency ecosystem. As a part of his role, Purohit will spearhead the company's strategic relationship with the country's leading brands and agencies to drive Meta's revenue growth across key channels in India, as well as partner with the media and creative ecosystems for accelerating adoption of digital tools by the largest advertisers and agencies. He will have the company’s key business vertical teams, agency teams, and business solutions teams reporting into him.

Prior to this, Purohit was serving as CEO of Tata CLiQ. He started his career at Aditya Birla Group before joining Tommy Hilfiger and then heading retail at Reliance Brands. At Amazon he played an instrumental role in leading and building Amazon Fashion.

Google-backed vernacular test preparation platform Adda247 has elevated the company’s chief product officer (CPO) Chandan Singh as cofounder.

In his new role, Singh will be handling product, growth, analytics and digital marketing of Adda247. The company said the change has been made because of Singh's "contribution and commitment to the company’s vision".

Singh, joined Adda247 in 2019 as VP-product and as per the firm has played a pivotal role in building the product side of the business. He was promoted to chief product officer in 2020.

“We are delighted to welcome Chandan Singh as the cofounder of Adda247. His wealth of knowledge, expertise and extensive experience will be integral to Adda247’s growth and promises exciting times for the company,” said Anil Nagar, founder and CEO, Adda247.

Apple exported more than $2.5 billion of iPhones from India from April to December, nearly twice the previous fiscal year’s total, Bloomberg News reported.

Foxconn Technology Group and Wistron Corp. have each shipped more than $1 billion of Apple’s marquee devices abroad in the first nine months of the fiscal year ending March 2023, the report added.

Pegatron Corp., another major contract manufacturer for Apple, is on track to move about $500 million of the gadgets overseas by the end of January.

Garuda Aerospace, a drone manufacturing company has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Rallis India, a subsidiary of Tata Chemicals for application and use of pesticides via drones in agriculture.

As per the agreement, Rallis will supply pesticides and crop nutrients to Garuda Aerospace for a pilot demonstration and spraying of pesticides on fields through drones mainly in the state of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

The partnership between Garuda Kisan drones and Rallis India will help leverage the key strengths of both the parties with Garuda Aerospace known to provide best drone solution in the Agriculture sector and Rallis known for its penetrative distribution network, the firm said in a statement.

The drone pilots will conduct demonstrations on approximately 1000 acres of land on crops such as Paddy, Onion, Bengal Gram, Wheat and Vegetables. This drone-based solution will also enable businesses to achieve their sustainability goals by helping drive the efficient use of resources, the statement added.

Garuda Aerospace has a fleet of 400 drones and a well-trained team of over 500 pilots in 26 locations across the country.

Twitter made further staff cuts in the trust and safety team handling global content moderation and in the unit related to hate speech and harassment, Bloomberg news reported.

At least a dozen more cuts on Friday night affected workers in the company's Dublin and Singapore offices, the report said.

Those laid off at the social media platform owned by Elon Musk include Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, a relatively recent hire as head of site integrity for the Asia-Pacific region, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter's senior director of revenue policy. Workers on teams handling policy on misinformation, global appeals and state media on the platform were also eliminated, the report added.

Twitter laid off roughly 3,700 employees in early November in a cost-cutting measure by Musk, and hundreds more subsequently resigned.

Cloud-based software firm Salesforce Inc is looking to cut costs by $3 billion to $5 billion, Chief Executive Marc Benioff told company insiders after announcing layoffs, Fortune reported, citing an audio recording of a meeting.

Salesforce said that it plans to cut jobs by 10 percent and close some offices, after rapid pandemic hiring left it with a bloated workforce amid an economic slowdown.

Real estate will be a major part of the cost restructuring process, Benioff told employees in a meeting. He added that the company is still growing and is very successful, as per the report.

Benioff also indicated that there could be more potential layoffs after the job cuts that occurred this week, CNBC said separately. Benioff said the lack of productivity was largely coming from new account executives, the report added.

Facebook parent Meta said it was removing content supporting or praising the weekend ransacking of Brazilian government buildings by anti-democratic demonstrators.

Tens of thousands of supporters of Brazil's far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro smashed presidential palace windows, flooded parts of Congress with a sprinkler system and ransacked rooms in the Supreme Court in a more than three-hour uprising.

"In advance of the election, we designated Brazil as a temporary high-risk location and have been removing content calling for people to take up arms or forcibly invade Congress, the Presidential palace and other federal buildings," a Meta spokesman said.

"We are also designating this as a violating event, which means we will remove content that supports or praises these actions," he said. "We are actively following the situation and will continue removing content that violates our policies."

Ant Group's founder Jack Ma will give up control of the Chinese fintech giant in an overhaul that seeks to draw a line under a regulatory crackdown that was triggered soon after its mammoth stock market debut was scuppered two years ago.

Ant's $37 billion IPO, which would have been the world's largest, was cancelled at the last minute in November 2020, leading to a forced restructuring of the financial technology firm and speculation the Chinese billionaire would have to cede control.

A former English teacher, Ma previously possessed more than 50 percent of voting rights at Ant but the changes will mean that his share falls to 6.2 percent, according to Reuters calculations.

Ma only owns a 10 percent stake in Ant, an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group but has exercised control over the company through related entities, according to Ant's IPO prospectus filed with the exchanges in 2020.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group is planning a logistics hub at Istanbul Airport and a data centre near the Turkish capital Ankara with an investment of more than $1 billion, its president, Michael Evans, was cited as saying.

Turkey's Sabah newspaper reported Evans as saying in an interview that the company was looking to invest in Europe and the Middle East and that he sees Turkey as a very strong production base.

"We have a serious investment plan at Istanbul Airport. We can evaluate e-export plans from here to Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. We plan an investment of more than $1 billion," Evans said.

Trendyol, one of Turkey's best known e-commerce platforms, is backed by Alibaba.