In an email Friday, Lyft’s new CEO David Risher announced a major labor reduction. In addition, Risher said Lyft is revamping to “better meet riders and drivers.” Despite the layoffs, the corporation maintained its first-quarter guidance.
Lyft drivers don’t work for the company. So instead, almost 4,000 full-time employees will be laid off. April 27 emails will inform employees of their employment status.
Lyft would not reveal the number of layoffs. However, according to WSJ sources, 1,200 workers, 30% of the overall staff, will be affected.
After co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer left Lyft last month, Risher became CEO.
In the email, Risher said he chose to help the organization achieve its two main goals.
Lyft helps clients get out so they may live together and provides drivers control over their time and money.
We must be quicker, flatter, and closer to riders and drivers to fulfill this mission. We must lower costs to provide affordable rides, appealing earnings for drivers, and profitable growth. These savings will improve pricing, pick-up times, and driver wages. These necessitate shrinking and reorganizing.
Those who follow Lyft’s difficulties in staying up with Uber may not be surprised.
In a late March interview with TechCrunch, Risher said Lyft might remove its shared rides option and make other business model adjustments to focus on its main ride-hailing business and become profitable.
He named many other products and services that could disappear, including Wait & Save, which lets users in some locations pay a cheaper fee by waiting for the best-located driver.
“It’s possible that maybe we don’t need both of those anymore and that we can focus all our resources on doing a fewer number of things better,” Risher told TechCrunch at the time. “Maybe it’s time to say the shared rides were great for a time, but let that go.”
How this might affect its bike-sharing business is unclear.
