Staff at Intel Research and Development have been told the company plans to close its facility at Shannon in Co Clare by late next year, with the base for the firm’s operations in Ireland moving to Intel’s campus in Leixlip.
About 750 people are employed by Intel Research and Development in Shannon and staff there have been offered the same redundancy or early retirement options made available to workers in other parts of the group.
In its messaging to employees it was not suggested, however, that any additional job losses would result from the closure of the facility in the town which opened as Intel Shannon in 2000 and remains a separate entity.
Asked about the future of the facility, a spokesperson for Intel said the company is “shifting our global real estate strategy to focus on fewer, more populated locations. We are still working through plans for each business unit. We will provide more detailed information in coming months”.
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Of the 750 employees, about 300 are understood to work in the area, many of them on a hybrid basis, with the rest employed by the company but participating in teams across the wider group, some at Leixlip and others outside of Ireland.
The company indicated that it will take about a year to relocate labs and other equipment currently in place at Shannon to Leixlip but it has been suggested that some work may transfer to international sites if it cannot be accommodated at the campus near Dublin.
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The most recent published accounts for the company, for 2022, show it made pretax profits of $45 million (€40 million) up from $31 million the year before on revenues of $215 million, up from $166 million.
Almost all of its income is listed as being from work for the Intel Corporation. It received tax credits related to its research work of some $20 million. Average pay at the company was about €125,000.
The company’s staff are understood to have been made aware of the plan to close the plant only after the deadline for redundancy and early retirement packages closed but there does not seem to be any requirement for additional staff to leave as a result of the move.
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The majority largely work remotely or at other locations at present and it seems this will continue. A number of contractors’ service jobs would be expected to go at the Shannon location, however.
Applications for redundancy and early retirement packages across the company closed two weeks ago and Intel has established teams to decide on who should be allowed to depart, something taken by some within the company as indicating the schemes were oversubscribed.
The company has offered redundancy terms of five weeks’ pay for each year of service plus two weeks’ statutory redundancy, with a cap of 104 weeks or €500,000, whichever is lower. Staff with fewer than two years’ service would receive a minimum of five weeks’ pay but not the statutory element.
The option to apply was available to about 4,000 of the company’s roughly 5,000 employees in Ireland.
Decisions on who will be allowed to depart are expected on September 16th, with most of those leaving on course to finish up on October 11th, although some who applied were subsequently approached about the possibility of staying on for a period to help with transition.
Other proposed economies include cuts to staff benefits, with many people at the Irish operation set to lose car allowances of between €13,000 and €15,000 from the start of next year.
Intel has only recently invested €17 billion at its Leixlip site in Co Kildare, adding a new cutting-edge chip manufacturing plant – Fab 34 – which doubled the tech giant’s Irish manufacturing space and saw it take on an extra 1,600 staff.
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