Jakarta, Indonesia – GrabKitchen, the cloud kitchen arm of tech and superapp company Grab, will be closing its operations in Indonesia by December 19, resulting in layoffs amounting to around 10 to 20 people.
A report from Tech In Asia notes that GrabKitchen saw inconsistencies in its growth in the local market. In its four years of operations, GrabKitchen has seen its business move to an asset-light business model.
Mayang Schreiber, chief communications officer at Grab Indonesia, said, “This situation forced us to take a difficult decision, which is not to continue our GrabKitchen operations in Indonesia.”
Regarding the layoffs, Grab said that some of its laid-off employees will be transferred to other divisions under Grab’s operations. They will receive compensation and fulfilment of obligations in accordance with the country’s regulations.
At the moment, GrabKitchen has over 48 foot points across Indonesia.
The GrabKitchen shutdown and layoffs contradicts Grab’s recent statements, stating that they won’t be seeing large layoffs despite the weak market.
“Around mid-year, we did some kind of specific reorganisations, but I know other companies have been doing mass layoffs, so we don’t see ourselves in that category,” Alex Hungate, chief operating officer at Grab, told Reuters in September.
However, Hungate did note back then that they will be shutting down its ‘dark stores’ or storage facilities for its groceries, and slowing the growth of its cloud kitchens.
“The other area where we’ve really tightened our strategic intent is in financial services where we were growing payments, wallets and non-bank financial lending quite significantly off-platform and on our platform,” he added.
The layoffs brought by the GrabKitchen shutdown follow a slew of similar updates globally, including with Carsome, Shopee, Netflix, Snap, Oracle, and Hootsuite.
