Intel is understood to be holding one-to-one meetings about voluntary redundancies capped at two years' salary
Workers at Intel’s operations in Ireland are understood to be holding one-to-one meetings about possible voluntary separation programmes that include redundancies capped at two years’ pay.
Last week, Intel workers in Ireland received an email from management telling them that within 72 hours of 4 May those who may be affected by Intel’s plans to cut 12,000 jobs worldwide – or 11pc of its workforce – would be notified.
Intel employs around 5,000 people in Ireland, mainly at its manufacturing site at Leixlip in Kildare but also at operations in Shannon and Cork.
It is expected that between 350 and 450 jobs could be lost at Intel in Ireland in the current global restructuring.
Redundancies are understood to be capped at two years’ salary, according to The Irish Times.
It could be a number of weeks before the full extent of cutbacks at the Intel plant are known.
In recent weeks, Intel announced disappointing first Q1 revenues of $13.8bn, the lowest level in a decade.
Intel shifts focus from PCs to cloud, IoT and 5G
CEO Brian Krzanich last week issued his mission statement for the future of Intel whereby he said Intel would be shifting its attention in the direction of smart devices, internet of things (IoT) and the cloud and would be less exposed to the flatlining PC business.
In recent days, it emerged Intel was also reducing its number of Atom mobile processor lines, pivoting engineering teams away from 3G and 4G development to the next generation of mobile networks, 5G.
Fortunately for the Irish operation at Intel, the company in recent years embarked on a major $5bn drive to transform its Irish facilities for new manufacturing processes, including 14nm chips for cloud data centres. The transformation that began in 2014 resulted in 5,000 jobs for construction workers.
Also, a skunkworks R&D team led by Intel’s vice-president in charge of IoT, Philip Moynagh, also led the development of the “designed in Ireland” Galileo makers’ board and most recently the Curie chip aimed at the wearables revolution and IoT.
The big question until an official announcement is made is whether any cutbacks at Intel in Ireland will be representational in light of the global restructure or if core processes will be affected.
Intel image via Shutterstock
