International IT company ABBYY fired almost all Russian developers in one day, Forbes has learned. We are talking about laying off up to 300 people from the company’s offices around the world. The publication’s sources say the dismissals were not due to nationality, but rather money.
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Forbes collected information about large-scale layoffs at ABBYY from various sources, mainly IT employees, developers of companies with a Russian passport.
Many interlocutors of the publication said that the cuts occurred during a work video conference with management.
“In a completely brutal and uncharacteristic way for ABBYY. No reasonable explanations were given,” an ABBYY developer told the publication.
People were told that their services were no longer needed and everyone was offered different conditions for ending cooperation: some received a salary for several months, others a few weeks.
According to Forbes interlocutors, ABBYY’s Russian staff in Cyprus has been reduced the most – source RB.RU said about dismissal from this office. In Belgrade, 80 people were fired.
The layoffs at ABBYY were not based on nationality, Kira Kuzmenko, founder of recruiting company NEWHR, who spoke with a senior manager at ABBYY, told the publication. Not only the Russian employees were fired, but the entire development team; Historically, this team consisted of people with Russian passports.
“The rest of the staff [с российским гражданством]For example, someone from the business development department stayed in the company,” Kuzmenko noted.
According to the publication’s interlocutors, ABBYY is laying off “expensive” employees to hire “cheap” ones from India in their place.
“The biggest expense item is payroll.” [фонд оплаты труда]and the largest payroll goes to the developers who make a technological product. We started looking at what was happening in the global market and where it was cheapest to hire,” Kuzmenko said.
According to one version, voiced by a Forbes source, ABBYY plans to transfer all product development to India, where it recently opened an office, and replace the Russian development team with an Indian one to save money.
RB.RU sent a request to ABBYY, but at the time of publication of this material did not receive a response.
In February 2022, ABBYY removed FineReader and two dozen other products from the Russian software registry. In October, the company sent a letter to its partners announcing the closure of all operations in Russia and was beginning the process of relocating key Russian personnel to development centers in Cyprus, Hungary and Serbia. Subsequently, the company began to liquidate its legal entities in Russia: Abi Production LLC and Abi LLC.
Author:
Kirill Bilyk
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
