MAM
Jaguar Land Rover to lay off a third of India workforce
NEW DELHI: Tata Group-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is undertaking its biggest ever retrenchment drive in its India operations, slashing its workforce by nearly a third, according to a report by Business Today.
The layoffs, which have already started and are expected to continue through this month, are part of its global strategy to shed about 2,000 non-manufacturing jobs by next fiscal, reported two weeks ago. JLR had also reduced its global headcount by 1,000 in 2018 and another 4,500 in 2019. These are part of its ongoing restructuring drive Project Charge+ through which it aims to save about £2.5 billion.
The news of restructuring was a "shocker" to the automaker's India workforce, who believed that they would be spared due to the small market JLR has in the country, Business Today quoted a source as saying. Moreover, there was a false sense of complacency that because JLR's parent firm Tata Motors is an Indian entity, it would not touch its Indian employees.
JLR issued a statement clarifying that the layoffs were being undertaken to increase efficiency in a bid to find the right cost structure for its workforce. It did mention the number of employees being retrenched, details of the severance package being offered to them, or whether the salaries of the top management have been slashed.
JLR is considered a straggler in the Indian luxury car market, which itself has not grown by much in the last five years. The British brands saw their sales decline by 74 per cent in 2020 and a loss of market share of 10.62 percentage points. In comparison, the biggest in the business – Mercedes Benz – saw a 43 per cent decline, BMW by 32 per cent and Audi by 63 per cent.
Last month, JLR's global CEO Thierry Bollore, who took over the reins of the company only last September, said the Jaguar brand would move away from its iconic high-performance internal combustion engines entirely and produce only electric vehicles by 2025, while Land Rover will have its first fully electric SUV by 2024.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
