Alabbar-founded Noon cuts 10% of jobs to lower costs

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E-commerce platform Noon.com has cut about 10 percent of its roughly 3,400-strong workforce to boost efficiency and lower costs.

The layoffs at the Dubai-based firm include roles in marketing, advertising and other departments, the company founder Mohamed Alabbar told Bloomberg.

Noon has been cutting costs and reducing headcount for the past year and a half, Alabbar added.

“We started before the big tech companies did, but we’re done now,” he stated.

Noon was established in 2016, with Alabbar raising $1 billion from backers such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).

In 2021, Alabbar said investors, including the PIF, were set to invest another $2 billion to help Noon upgrade its infrastructure to speed up deliveries, the news report said. 

Alabbar said the company’s “cash burn rate has gone down drastically and margins are getting better” and so it “may not need to get that $2 billion”. 

Noon operates in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and was looking to expand to other nations across the Middle East.  

In November 2022, Noon said it would build the UAE’s largest fulfilment centre in Abu Dhabi as part of an anchor investment into the emirate’s fast-growing e-commerce space.

The 252,000 sq m facility will be developed in collaboration with Abu Dhabi Investment Office, fuelling the next growth phase in the emirate’s digital economy.