900 jobs to go at eircom by 2010 - 400 by the end of this year

fatherdougalmag

Eircom has confirmed that 900 jobs are to go by 2010, starting with 400 job cuts by the end of this year.
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Its drive for productivity will also see it put up the price of having an eircom landline in coming months.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0530/eircom.html

Serbian

I don't see how a drive for Productivity forces them to increase the price of line rental, unless they are planning on using the cash to fund redundancies.

dahamsta

Sack the managers and the biddies, promote the linemen. Job done.

adam

Solair

I really can't see what the huge fuss is over. eircom plc inherited a vastly over-staffed organisation from Telecom Eireann. There has been a lot of growth of compeditors and other sectors, like mobile which are not owned by eircom. I'd say there's been net growth in jobs the telecoms sector generally.

eircom's just going to have to shrink a bit!

There should be plenty of jobs into which eircom employees can move. It's a bouyent economy and eircom plc is not a part of the department of social welfare.

It's tough, but they can't go on charging customers through the nose and relying on their monopoly services i.e. line rental to keep a a bloated organisation a float.

eircom's market share has to reduce. It's the reality of an open market and eircom's position as the incumbant former monopolist.

thefinalstage

Solair wrote:

I really can't see what the huge fuss is over. eircom plc inherited a vastly over-staffed organisation from Telecom Eireann. There has been a lot of growth of compeditors and other sectors, like mobile which are not owned by eircom. I'd say there's been net growth in jobs the telecoms sector generally.

eircom's just going to have to shrink a bit!

There should be plenty of jobs into which eircom employees can move. It's a bouyent economy and eircom plc is not a part of the department of social welfare.

It's tough, but they can't go on charging customers through the nose and relying on their monopoly services i.e. line rental to keep a a bloated organisation a float.

eircom's market share has to reduce. It's the reality of an open market and eircom's position as the incumbant former monopolist.

Using a lot of big words and talking utter poo!

Down sizing staff numbers won't lower their market share, the current incumbent monopolist will maintain its share until the government steps in.
Eircom could easily afford to pay these staff and not raise line rental but hey they have to make it look like they are in trouble or people will get pissed at job losses...Remind me what was Eircoms net profit last year?

Solair

It's also servicing an absolutely massive level of debt that appears to be growing.

eircom did come from a semi-state background and you can be sure that there are all sorts of odd work practices that could be made a lot more efficient. It's shed quite a lot of employees via spin offs of subsiduaries over the last while. I'd say you could see similar things happen again to make up the numbers.

It employes a lot of people who may no longer be doing jobs that are really key to the business itself either.

Don't forget, the employees own 35% of the company, it's not really in a company that will ever be in a position to abuse staff. So, I think the redunancies will have to be fairly reasonably done.

Whatever number of staff eircom has though, you can guarentee if they don't do something about breaking the monopoly on the supply of the local loop that it will continue to screw landline customers.

I'd say the only realistic sollution is to split eircom into wholesale and retail in the landline business.

Owning both and operating them as a single entity is a major conflict of interest.

As for eircom's business model, I think it's completely unsustainable.
It's over-dependent on line rental for its fixed line business. Government regulation and/or a technology shift will leave them with a drastically reduced income.

Mobile services are getting a lot more compeditive (particularly on contract) and the likes of Digiweb etc providing phone service. We also have UPC (NTL/Chorus) doing long over-due massive network upgrades, which will see cable internet / phone service being made available to a huge number of people.

eircom's short sighted business model could see them doing very badly.

Blaster99

eircom has always responded quickly to competition and will do so again. In other words, they will milk the line rental for as long as they can.

lucernarian

Blaster99 wrote:

eircom has always responded quickly to competition and will do so again. In other words, they will milk the line rental for as long as they can.

Indeed. That's the bottom line of it. But they will have to invest the proceeds of line rental sooner or later. They can service their large debt or they can expand their market share. The poisoned chalice is theirs, thankfully.