Gaming unicorn MPL exits Indonesia, cuts 10% of its workers
Indian esports and skill gaming platform, MPL which recently entered the unicorn club back in September last year at a valuation of $2.3 billion has reportedly sacked 10% of its team or 100 employees and has decided to pull out of Indonesia.
MPL co-founders Sai Srinivas and Shubh Malhotra communicated this message to its employees via Email which read, “The last few months have been insane. The philosophy of growth at all costs is now reversed. The market is now rewarding profitable growth over growth at all costs."
“It’s imperative that we as a company respond to this change and respond fast. We have always said that the market is flowing like a river – you cannot fight it, you have to row downstream," the email read, according to VCCircle.
Mobile Premier League(MPL) offers around 70 games including the likes of daily fantasy sports, quizzes, board games, esports etc. The company which was founded way back in 2018 claims to have almost 90 million users mostly around India, Europe and the United States of America.
Sai Srinivas claimed that the Indonesian business returns were several times lower than what the company is seeing in India.
According to TOI, “It is time to take the difficult decision and redeploy the resources in other parts of the businesses,” Srinivas said.
The co-founder also expects to hit an annual net revenue of $200-250 million by the end of FY23. Srinivas also claimed that even though the company hasn’t been spending millions of dollars in marketing major events such as the Indian Premier League(IPL) , the net revenue has seen a growth of about 25% in the last three months in India.
According to TOI Srinivas said,“Breaking our dependency on IPL and achieving massive growth without spending a penny on IPL sets us free, not to mention it now leaves us with a massive arsenal of marketing capital that we can deploy in the second half of the year to continue the growth from here.”
Startups in India are continuing to sack employees to cut costs amid an adverse funding environment. Earlier this month, in the edtech space Vedantu sacked close to 424 full time & contractual employees in order to cut costs. Two weeks prior to that it had sacked about 200 employees.
