SA's biggest social network, Mxit, has gone through a strategic planning process as part of its plan to grow aggressively next year, but has also shed 41 jobs.
Mxit approached staff whose positions were highlighted as being at risk, after it decided to cut back or stop some activities. It says it has accepted the voluntary retrenchment of 41 of its around 150 employees.
The retrenched staff have been offered additional months' salary, leave and the legally-required one week for every year worked in retrenchment pay. Mxit says the savings from its smaller staff complement, as well as the R100 million injection it received in October, will go into key growth areas.
Mxit says the key areas include self-service community creation tools, developer support, technology innovation, advertising partnerships, and collaboration with key companies and brands.
Streamlining
Acting CEO Francois Swart says: "We have just completed a thorough and intense strategic planning process, in which the whole business was involved at some level in the process. Our goal is to more than double our user base during the next year.
"To achieve this, we need to take a very focused approach to what Mxit does and does not do. Regrettably, that means stopping or cutting back activities in some areas."
Mxit, which has almost 10 million active users, will no longer generate content in-house, and is also streamlining and automating some of its support activities so that it does not need such a big team.
The social network is also bringing together a number of teams, which focus on provision, communities, apps and advertising, into one macro division. The cross-functional nature of the division should mean that it gets more done, faster, with fewer people and with less friction, the company explains.
Swart says Mxit expects to see rapid growth as it will invest in user acquisition, improve the user experience, empower its developer community through richer APIs, and further promote the "excellent" results its advertising partners have been achieving over the last two years.
Earlier this month, Mxit revealed a Web-based toolset to help social media community managers use the platform as part of their overall brand strategies.
Some of the functionality Mxit Launch will provide include: content publishing, interactions and moderation, free broadcast messaging with segmentation, Google Analytics integration, ad injection, micro-billing, competitions, and real money payments with Mxit Money. The toolset is in beta testing and could be available as early as March.
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