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The company released a statement on Monday saying that the domestic market is no longer strategic for the company for reasons such as inflation and Yolanda Díaz’s ‘Rider Law’, which requires self-employed delivery drivers to become salaried employees.
In Spain, Stuart will no longer operate in Barcelona, Madrid, Zaragoza, Bilbao and Valencia. However, it will maintain its nerve centre in the Catalan capital from where it has been running the company since 2015.
The closure, therefore, will affect all its delivery drivers and a large part of the office staff, which is estimated to end up triggering around 400 redundancies, out of the total of 468 employees it currently has on staff, due to the sustained losses it has made over the last few years.
However, the company’s management has said it will keep a small part of its technical team in Spain to try its luck in another country. By adjusting operating expenses, if the proposed plan goes ahead, it will improve the financial viability of the Stuart business, ensuring that it has the resources to take advantage of future opportunities in growth markets as well as maintaining part of the workforce at Stuart Delivery, S.L.,’ it states in its justification for the redundancy plan.