Nov 10, 2020
As the food delivery business makes a good recovery, Swiggy is rewarding its team that has worked relentlessly over the last many months with a meaningful wealth creation opportunity through an ESOP liquidity program. Hence Swiggy has commissioned a secondary liquidity programme worth about $7-9 million from its employees.
Girish Menon, vice president of HR at Swiggy, informed that over 40% of employees with ESOP benefits – current and those we had to unfortunately part ways with earlier this year- will be eligible to exercise their stocks. Some of them will be able to liquidate their ESOPs at as much as 3x premium of the allotted price.
Swiggy joins a clutch of Indian startups that have initiated such buyback programmes in the last few months amid the pandemic. Earlier this year, services platform Urban Company and edtech startup Unacademy undertook similar stock buyback options. Both startups liquidated about $5 million worth of stock options.
Food delivery orders for Swiggy, which had dipped to negligible levels post-February-March and during the lockdown period were able to recover across India to around 80-85 percent of pre-Covid order value, Swiggy had said last month. On the other hand, as per a Zomato analysis, the market had recovered in September till around over 85 percent of pre-Covid gross merchandise value up.
Swiggy had claimed that is adding more than 7,000 new restaurants per month on its platform — around 3,000 more than pre-Covid. Out of these 7,000 units, 6,000 are small and medium outlets vis-à-vis 3,500 before Covid.