Compaq's plans to axe up to 11 per cent of its workforce worldwide should not affect its 2,200 employees in Ireland.

Last month, the US parent company announced plans for up to 8,000 redundancies in its 69,000 workforce after reporting hefty second-quarter losses.

Compaq has not yet released a detailed breakdown of where the job losses will occur but up to 1,000 will be in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Ireland should not be affected, however.

"Overall, the outlook for the Compaq business in Ireland is healthy," the company said yesterday. "At this point, we do not anticipate headcount reductions in any of our operations in Ireland."

Compaq has operations in Dublin, Belfast and Galway, following its takeover last year of Digital Equipment. They include sales, marketing and service centres, the European customer support centre, and a European software distribution centre. But Compaq said it would continue to seek cost savings and revenue opportunities to increase its profitability.

"We remain totally focused on meeting our customers' needs and positioning the company for increased growth and profitability in Ireland in quarter four and into fiscal year 2000," it said.

Earlier this year, during a previous redundancy programme, Compaq said no employees in either Dublin or Galway would be affected. It said also it planned to expand the Dublin call centre as part of its strategy to become an Internet leader.

The latest redundancy programme follows last month's announcement of $270 million (#255 million) in pre-tax losses in the second quarter to June 30th, 1999. This has been attributed to price pressure on personal computers, inadequate revenue growth and a non-competitive cost structure.

The company has been suffering in particular from a brutal price war in personal computers where it has been losing market share to its fast-growing, Texas rival, Dell Computer Corp.