Ireland ‘will be affected’ by Microsoft job losses, says Varadkar

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar confirmed on Thursday that Microsoft workers in the Republic will be affected by US technology giant’s announcement on Wednesday that it is shedding 10,000 jobs globally, or nearly 5 per cent of its workforce.

“We’ve been in contact with Microsoft,” Mr Varadkar told reporters at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on Thursday, adding that “Ireland will be affected by” the job cuts.

“The company will, of course, want to talk to its employees first, and [it] wouldn’t be appropriate for me to make any announcements in that regard,” he said. “But what we are seeing is a resizing, if you like, of the tech sector and, with a few exceptions, the job losses have been within the 5-10 per cent space.”

He added: “That’s not to play it down in any way at all, but when there are job losses of that scale it’s almost always possible to do it through voluntary redundancies, and people are able to find other jobs in the sector because there’s still a huge number of vacancies.”

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Microsoft Ireland employs 3,500 people. In a note to employees on Wednesday, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said the global lay-offs, affecting less than 5 per cent of the workforce, would conclude by the end of March. This level of cuts would equate to fewer than 175 jobs in Ireland.

Hundreds of Irish jobs have been affected by decisions by the likes of Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and Stripe late last year to slash payroll costs globally. Local employees of Salesforce and Zendesk are also expected to be hit by more recent international lay-off decisions by these groups.

IDA Ireland interim chief executive Mary Buckley said in Davos this week she expected more multinational technology companies to shed jobs this year. It follows 8-9 per cent growth in each of the past two years in information and communications technology jobs among IDA client companies in the Republic.

Mr Varadkar is using his visit to the WEF to meet executives from a number of companies with a presence in the Republic, including Amazon and Intel, and court businesses that do not yet have a presence in the State.

Microsoft is also grappling with a slump in the personal computer market after a pandemic boom fizzled out, leaving little demand for its Windows and accompanying software.

Among Microsoft’s businesses in the Republic, the company has an engineering hub at its campus in Leopardstown in south Dublin. It also owns LinkedIn, which has a significant presence in Ireland.

Bilateral talks

Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar said that he is using his time in Davos to also “talk to political counterparts, other prime ministers, other ministers from governments around the world about the situation in Ukraine, the energy crisis, and also prospects for the world economy in the months ahead”.

The Taoiseach is set on Friday to meet Keir Starmer, leader of the UK opposition Labour Party, who has arrived in the Swiss Alpine town with a message that he wants to improve the UK’s relationship with the EU after Brexit.

Mr Varadkar said that it “would be a really good thing” if a breakthrough on the Northern Ireland protocol was achieved by 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement in April.

“But if that’s not possible, that’s not going to cause us to stop. It isn’t an absolute deadline,” he said. “But of course, for lots of reasons, it’d be nice to have an agreement before then.”