Eternal to cut about 250 jobs as it closes Hyderabad support centre
Zomato and Blinkit parent Eternal is shutting its Hyderabad customer-support centre, consolidating in-house operations in Gurugram and outsourcing more support functions. Affected employees were offered four months’ severance.
What happened
Eternal, parent of Zomato and Blinkit, will shut its Hyderabad customer-support centre and lay off about 250 staff. It is centralising remaining in-house
Key facts
- Around 250 employees to be laid off
- Four months' severance offered
- Customer-support model changes underway for around six months
- Eternal shares down around 3% to ₹318.15
- Stock gained about 31% over six months
- 52-week high: ₹368.45
- Potential MSCI-related inflows: around $650 million
Why this matters
Consolidating support in Gurugram while outsourcing more functions indicates Eternal is prioritizing asset-light operating leverage over expanding internal shared-services capacity.
What to watch
- Quarterly employee-cost, outsourced-services and adjusted EBITDA commentary from Eternal.
- Customer-service indicators: app-store complaints, social-media escalation volume, refund disputes and reported response times after the closure.
- Any disclosure of additional office closures, centralisation plans or vendor contracts in other functions or cities.
- Management commentary on AI automation, support-ticket deflection and customer-experience metrics.
- Blinkit growth investment intensity and whether cost savings are retained as margin or reinvested aggressively.
- Labour complaints, local political attention or litigation connected to the Hyderabad closure.
- Increase use of third-party customer-support vendors and tighten service-level agreements around resolution time, refunds and escalation rates.
- Deploy more AI-led self-service, chat automation and agent-assist tools to reduce future support-ticket volumes.
- Concentrate retained in-house teams in Gurugram on complex, high-value or safety-sensitive escalations while vendors handle routine contacts.
- Reallocate savings toward Blinkit dark-store growth, customer acquisition, delivery reliability and profitability initiatives.
- Potentially conduct a wider review of corporate overhead and duplicated support functions across Zomato, Blinkit and group operations.