One-hundred-and-twenty-five workers being made redundant at an Apple Computer subsidiary in Dublin have the necessary skills to find other employment, the managing director at the plant said yesterday. Mr Stephen Meagher said he had heard "about two weeks ago" about the plan to close the Claris Ireland plant at Blanchardstown over a four-month phasing out period.
The move is part of a global restructuring by Apple which will see Claris Corporation, which was established in the US in 1987, being streamlined and renamed as Filemaker Inc.
The overall strategy saw Apple launch a direct offensive on Dell Computer last November in an effort to achieve long-term profitability. "We are coming after you, buddy," Mr Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, declared at the time.
While Dell announced a 3,000 jobs expansion in Ireland last week, the fallout from the Apple strategy is that almost half of the 300 lay-offs associated with the Claris restructuring are being achieved through the Blanchardstown closure. The new strategy has seen cutbacks in sales support staff in the Apple plant in Cork, but the number of employees involved in manufacturing the G3 PowerPC 750 processor has increased, maintaining the number of workers at more than 1,500. Mr Meagher said that Apple-branded software and some Claris-branded software, such as ClarisWorks, which were produced in Dublin for the European market, would be integrated into Apple.
The Cork operation will benefit from the Blanchardstown closure, managing the European integration of the Apple and ClarisWorks software portfolio. The new FileMaker company will concentrate on the FileMaker Pro line of database software, the most popular database software for the Macintosh. In 1997 the FileMaker Pro line recorded turnover of $73 million (£52 million). "Because of that, we do not need the Blanchardstown facility to operate one production line," Mr Meagher said.
He added that the localisation of Filemaker (tailoring to individual countries) was likely to be carried out from the US, along with the manufacturing aspect, while distribution will be outsourced to "a network of Irish vendors".
"At the end of the day it is an internal Claris thing," he said.
He said that the workers had expertise in information systems or in customer services and were "highly employable, highly skilled". "These people see futures beyond Claris and they are right," he said.
They would be getting a good severance package and would be advised by career change consultants and investment experts, he added.
Claris Ireland was established at the Airways Industrial Estate, Dublin, in 1988. Three years later it moved, with 50 employees, to the new £7 million 67,000 sq ft centre in Blanchardstown. Mr Meagher said the building would now be sold.
