Mobile social network Mxit has confirmed that it has retrenched more than a quarter of its workforce. Forty-one people from of its 150-strong staff complement were let go as part of a refocusing of its strategy for 2013.
The move comes only two months after CEO Alan Knott-Craig left the company. Knott-Craig resigned and also left World of Avatar, the investment company he founded and of which Mxit is a subsidiary, after reportedly clashing with shareholders, who include former FirstRand executives Paul Harris and GT Ferreira.
In a statement on Tuesday, Mxit said it was aiming for aggressive growth in 2013 with the implementation of an “extremely focused technology and business plan”.
Mxit secured an investment of R100m in October and said this, along with savings it expected to generate from company-wide cost cutting, would be channeled into “key growth areas”. These included “self-service community creation tools, developer support, technology innovation, advertising partnerships and collaboration with key companies and brands”.
Acting CEO Francois Swart said Mxit had “just completed a thorough and intense strategic planning process, in which the whole business was involved at some level in the process”.
“Our goal is to more than double our user base during the next year. To achieve this, we need to take a very focused approach to what Mxit does and does not do. Regrettably, that means stopping or cutting back activities in some areas.
“Rapid growth is expected by investing in user acquisition, improving the user experience, empowering our developer community through richer [application programming interfaces], and further promoting the excellent results our advertising partners have been achieving over the last two years.”
The company says it approached staff members whose positions were “highlighted as being at risk”, asking them to take voluntary redundancy packages. It accepted voluntary retrenchment deals with 41 of its employees. — (c) 2012 NewsCentral Media
- See also: Trouble in Mxit-land