Microsoft Confirms More Redundancies As Central Bank Warns Over Tech Job Losses

Tech giant Microsoft is to cull an additional 60 jobs within its Irish-based workforce as part of the company’s global cost-cutting plans announced in January.

The new cuts are in addition to the 120 layoffs that Microsoft Ireland confirmed in February and are another example of a company in the sector driving the Dublin office market cutting back on staff. 

Microsoft employs more than 3,500 people in Ireland and its 366K SF Leopardstown HQ opened in 2018. The new cuts will bring its total number of Irish-based redundancies to 180 people, equating to a corresponding reduction of around 18K SF of real estate, at an average of around 100 SF per person.

The announcement comes as the estimated number of job losses at tech companies in Ireland has reached just over 6% of the new jobs created in the digital sector since the end of 2019, according to the latest report from the Central Bank.

Overall 37K jobs have been added by information and communications technology companies in Ireland over the past three years, the Central Bank estimated, though the sector’s contribution to taxes and wider employment will be outsized because of high wages and links with other services.

ICT accounts for just over 6% of employment but 12% of all income tax paid and 21.3% of corporation tax receipts.

In addition, the report found that the overall fiscal impact of a downturn will be “larger” because of ICT’s links with other sectors of the economy. Sales to the ICT sector make up around 40% of turnover in the administrative and support services sector and 15% of turnover in the wholesale and retail trades.

The digital sector grew two to three times faster than the economy as a whole between 2018 and 2021, according to the report and employment in ICT grew by almost 30% since the fourth quarter of 2019 to 164.6K workers at the end of last year.

The report calculated that if all of the global percentage reductions in workforces announced by the tech companies were applied to their Irish operations, this would amount to just over 2.3K layoffs, equal to 1.4% of those employed in the sector.

That could also mean another cumulative 230K of commercial real estate space no longer required by the tech sector, again at 100 SF per person.

The actual number of confirmed lays offs to the end of February was 1,474.