Ericssons, the Swedish electronics firm which has had a presence in Athlone for nearly 30 years, has refused to release any details whether there will be any job losses amongst the 400 staff at its Blyry campus as part of the 5,000 job losses worldwide announced by the company yesterday (January 22 ).
“Which countries, the who and the where, we haven’t decided yet,” said Fredrik Hallstan, at the company’s public relations department in Stockholm.
“What’s stated in the Q4 [fourth quarter] report is all we’re saying at the moment”.
Mr Hallstan would not be drawn on when this decision might be made.
“No comment on that. We will see,” he said. The company announced it was to cut 5,000 of its 80,000 workers worldwide, as profits fell to US$465m in its fourth quarter results.
It is expected at least 1,000 of these cuts will occur at Ericsson’s headquarters in Stockholm.
Despite sales rising by 11 per cent across the company’s entire global portfolio, and the company being in a strong financial position, the global economic situation has severely hurt its Sony Ericsson mobile division, according to CEO, Carl-Henric Svanberg in the just published report.
“The economic recession is spreading across the world,” he said.
“The effects on the global mobile network market should not be that significant, as most operators have healthy financial positions. There is a strong traffic growth and the networks are fairly loaded.
“It remains, however, difficult to more precisely predict to what extent consumer telecom spending will be affected and how operators will act.
“To date, our infrastructure business is hardly impacted at all, but it would be unreasonable to think that this would be the case also throughout 2009.
