It’s the season of retail belt-tightening and restructuring and with it comes negative news of potential job losses. Fashion/lifestyle retail giant Premark is planning to cut around 150 jobs in Ireland, the UK and US, with around two-thirds of earmarked redundancies targeting its Dublin headquarters.
Positions in HR, finance and procurement are in danger as Primark looks to outsource a number of support function activities to a third party, reported to be Accenture in Mumbai.
A Primark spokesperson told Irish broadcaster RTE: “As we continue to grow internationally, we need to evolve our operating model to best support this ambition.
“We’re exploring how resourcing via external partners could help support our operations so that we can focus our own resources on what we do best.”
And they confirmed: “As part of this, we are now proposing that a number of support function activities move to a third party and we are beginning a collective consultation. This unfortunately will impact a number of Primark colleagues primarily in our head office operations.”
The restructure comes at a time when Primark continues to expand its retail ops internationally. After unveiling major growth plans for Italy in May, the business also recently confirmed plans to debut in the Middle East.
But while overseas ops grow, business for many stores in the UK market remains sluggish at best with cautious consumer sentiment leading to a 4% decline in sales in the 24 weeks to March and early evidence of slowness continuing into early summer despite a strong Easter-backed April.
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