Business/Brands & Marketing
TECH ROUNDUP! Alerzo sacks 600 employees, LP candidate introduces podcasts in campaign tour
Alerzo has laid off hundreds of employees and closed many of its 40 warehouses in a bid to reach profitability by Q3 this year.
Alerzo, a technology-enabled middleman distributor of groceries to mom and pop retailers in Nigeria, has laid off hundreds of employees and closed many of its 40 warehouses in the country.
Sources estimated 600 employees were laid off and 14 warehouses closed in the cuts.
Responding, Alerzo’s chief financial officer Harish Venkatesh confirmed the number of warehouses affected was accurate but said they had been suspended.
Also Read: Flutterwave makes crucial announcement over alleged N2.9bn hack
He did not specify the number of employees that were laid off. Venkatesh said the decision to reduce headcount was done “in discussion with our supplier partners and their market views along with investors and management in an accelerated manner to get us to profitability by summer.”
“Given previous market dynamics, we hired very aggressively during the past couple of years to fuel quick growth and expansion across the country. This does not align now with the economic environment today, so we, unfortunately, had to make changes to our business to be more focused around pursuing strong unit economics,” Alerzo revealed to the press.
Social Media
Labour Party’s candidate for Lagos gubernatorial election, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour has included podcasts to his media tour in a last desperate bid to win young voters. Last week he was a guest on Madeaux Africa Network’s podcast Menisms.
Google has started to roll out an updated UI for Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides that’s meant to fit in with its Material Design 3 language, The Verge reports. The apps still work the same way they used to, but Google writes in an announcement post that they should now be a bit more “simplified,” with less clutter and a few improvements and additions.
Twitter has suffered another significant outage, with various elements of the platform going down as a result of an “internal change that had some unintended consequences.” Many users were unable to view images, click links, or even load the site for a brief period before Twitter was able to get things back up and running.
World
Elon Musk said that he will roll out the end-to-end encrypted DM feature for Twitter this month. Along with that, users will also get the ability to reply to individual messages and use any reaction emoji. “Aiming to roll out ability to reply to individual DMs, use any reaction emoji & encryption later this month,” Musk wrote.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai defended the cloud unit’s new desk-sharing policy for employees, describing some of the company’s offices as practically empty and reminding staffers that real estate is pricey. “To me, it’s obvious that they are trying to be efficient and save money but at the same time also utilize resources,” Pichai said in a companywide meeting.
America’s SEC has filed an emergency action against Miami investment adviser BKCoin for a $100 million crypto fraud scheme. Specifically, the press release cites co-founder Kevin Kang and states that they have frozen the assets of the adviser. They accuse the company of orchestrating the scheme from October 2018 through September 2022, which they say saw the firm obtain over $100 million from “at least 55 investors,” for the purpose of investing in crypto assets.
