This article is from page 3 of the 2011-12-06 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 3 JPG
NEARLY 1,000 jobs have been lost in the Shannon Free Zone since 2009 – a crisis that was brought sharply into focus once more last Thursday when it was revealed that 100 more jobs could be lost in Sykes Enterprises.
The technology support firm is set to close its Shannon operation a quarter of a century after locating in the Free Zone and only four years after it was one of the fastest growing companies in the mid-west region as its staff numbers soared close to 400.
The impending closure with the loss of the last remaining 100 jobs comes only two months after 75 redundancies were announced when the company lost a major contract with Sony, one of its biggest clients.
Sykes established in the Shannon Free Zone in 1987 and at its peak of operations employed 380 at the facility, which is one of the company’s 80 global centres.
Sykes’ biggest growth phase came in 2006/2007 when it was one of the fastest growing companies in the mid-west region, with the company’s general manager for Europe, Colin Mitchell saying at the announcement of 100 new jobs, “Sykes Shannon has invested several million in equipment; furniture and fittings and leasehold improvement over the past ten years. This expansion, whilst increasing head count, will also provide an additional revenue flow to the Irish economy in terms of employer/employee contributions, and local spend on professional services, telecommunications and general domestic expenditure.”
Now, five years later comes Sykes’ imminent departure from Shannon, with a spokesperson for the company’s headquarters in Florida confirming that it was trying to consolidate its businesses worldwide, and that plants in Shannon and in South Africa would “face closure as a result of that process”.
It’s understood that these two plants have been singled out because of a decline in client demand for their services, which is to provide technical call centre services in a number of European languages.
The latest round of job losses at Sykes, which employs over 50,000 people worldwide, represents the fourth time in the last three years that the company has sought to scale down its Irish operation, with the final downsizing expected to bring about a closure in early 2012, 25 years after the company established in Shannon.
The jobs losses will bring to 955 the number have been lost in since in the last three years. Meanwhile, the latest figures secured by The Clare People reveal that in 2010 there was a net loss of 461 jobs at the Shannon Free Zone, while from a five-year period from 2003 to 2008 there were the figure stood of 250 net job losses.
These contrasting figures hammer home the extent of the hemorrhage of jobs from the county’s flagship industrial base, with the latest round of job cuts coming in the same week as government figures revealed that 15 jobs had been created in the county from the Dell European Globalisation Fund that was established for the region in 2009.