Eircom is to cut a further 50 jobs from its Northern Irish operations, the company revealed yesterday.
The job cuts are part of a scaling back of Eircom's business in Northern Ireland which will see it exit the residential market and concentrate on the business market only.
The telecoms company had already said in April that it was reducing staff in Northern Ireland from 180 to 140 as part of a review of its operations. This figure will now be reduced to 90 over the coming weeks. "We said then we were going to scale back and we announced various initial details about it and this is the final assessment of all of that," a spokesman for Eircom said. He said the company would focus entirely on data transfer for business customers, which he described as a higher margin part of the business.
"What we're doing is focusing on data and customer premises equipment, but not servicing the voice market in Northern Ireland." Eircom has around 6,000 corporate customers in Northern Ireland, while it is understood have around 1,000 residential customers.
But Eircom said it had no plans to exit the broadband market in Northern Ireland where it has a broadband licence.
"We have various licences, but we're not giving up any licences," said the spokesman. "The fact that we're continuing with the data market suggests that we're not."
The recent scaling back of its operations in Northern Ireland is part of Eircom's decision to concentrate on core business. In April, it said it was scaling back the operations of its UK subsidiary, Eircom UK, which involved a reduction in staffing levels from almost 100 people to a maximum of 20. The UK business now centres on servicing the communications requirements of corporate customers and managing Eircom's international traffic flows.
Meanwhile, Eircom Enterprise Fund, the venture capital subsidiary of Eircom, is to become an investor in Dublin-based Sentrio Technologies Ltd as part of a €1 million investment package.
Sentrio produces software solutions for the mobile computing industry.
