‘Fire 1,000 more employees and hire Ronaldo too’: Byju’s faces backlash over roping Messi amid layoffs

Edtech major Byju’s has recently roped in football star Lionel Messi as the first global brand ambassador. The company’s this move has received heavy criticism from the netizens, who have unleashed their fury on the world’s most valued edtech company which has also announced mass layoffs.

Byju’s, in a statement, revealed that Messi, who captains the Argentinian football team, has signed an agreement with the company to promote the cause of equitable education. However, Divya Gokulnath, Byju’s co-founder, stated that the company’s decision to sign Messi as a brand ambassador is that the deal is not a “typical sponsorship” but a “social partnership”.

Byju’s this deal with Messi was announced shortly after the firm revealed its plans to lay off up to 2,500 employees, around 5% of its 50,000 workforce. The company’s this announcement came after it posted delayed financial results for FY21. The company, during FY22, had announced that its losses had widened to Rs 4,559 crore, up nearly 20 times from Rs 231.69 crore loss posted during FY20.

According to a Money Control report, one LinkedIn user said, “Please fire 1,000 more employees and hire Ronaldo too,” while responding to Vineet Singh, Head – Brand and Creative Strategy at BYJU’S post that reveals the appointment of Messi as global brand ambassador.

Navin Talreja, co-founder of digital agency The Womb, posted on LinkedIn, “This toxicity of companies hiding behind funding winters has to stop! They let people go, and their partner agencies go (Has happened to us) and yet for them life seems to go on as normal. The money in the accounts of founders does not diminish then why should people and partners who helped you get that valuation in the first place suffer? Byju’s you should be banned from using Messi / Running any ads / Buying anything until you restore the jobs you have taken away.”

According to a PTI report, Byju’s had laid off around 100 employees from its media content division in Kerala. In the email to employees, Raveendran, the edtech platform’s founder and CEO, said that Byju’s has been compelled to focus on sustainability and capital-efficient growth because of adverse macroeconomic factors.

He further added, “I realise that there is a huge price to pay for walking on this path to profitability. I am truly sorry to those who will have to leave Byju’s, it breaks my heart too. I seek your forgiveness if this process is not as smooth as we had intended it to be. While we want to finish this process smoothly and efficiently, we don’t want to rush through it.”

Apart from layoffs, Byju’s has also been in news for its alleged ill practices of selling courses to parents and students in an aggressive manner. Moreover, the company has also faced criticism regarding audit issues, frequent customer complaints and devaluation rumours.

Gokulnath, in an ET Now interview, was asked whether the Messi-Byju’s deal was showing the company in a bad light after its worsening financial results and massive layoffs. To this Gokulnath said that it was “saddening and anguishing” that Byju’s EFA initiative received the same attention in the last three hours as it received in the last 18 months. She also elaborated on how the good things done by the company didn’t receive much attention previously.

She added: “All I can tell you right now is that it (Messi partnership) is not a typical sponsorship, it’s a social impact partnership. Everything is not a business partnership; there is value alignment, personality alignment, mission alignment when two entities come together and work.”

Interestingly, Gokulnath had neither mentioned anything specific about the nature of Byju’s “partnership” with Messi nor put a monetary value on the deal, revealed the ET report.

Divya Gokulnath, in another interview with PTI, told that the company will start focussing on building brand awareness overseas through new partnerships and hiring 10,000 teachers for India and overseas business. “We have designed a path to profitability which we plan to achieve by March 2023. We have built significant brand awareness throughout India and there is scope to optimise marketing budget and prioritise the spending in a way that creates a global footprint. Second is operational cost and the third is the integration of multiple business units,” she said.

She further added that the K10 subsidiaries — Meritnation, TutorVista, Scholar and HashLearn — will also be consolidated as one business unit under India business, while Aakash and Great Learning would continue to function as independent organisations.