Cost-cutting Accenture to cut 19,000 jobs worldwide

TECH consultancy Accenture announced Thursday (Friday in Manila) it will be cutting around 19,000 jobs, or 2.5 percent of its workforce, spread over the next 18 months, as part of a cost-cutting effort.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Dublin-headquartered company said it expects to incur $1.5 billion in costs as a result of the downsizing, including $1.2 billion directly related to the layoffs.

About half of the jobs lost are in administrative or support functions, not in areas that lead to billing of customers, the company said.

In the Philippines, Accenture has 50,000 employees and touts itself “as one of the largest and most mature IT companies in the country, with a long and successful track record of delivering complex technology-based solutions and outsourcing capabilities.”

Accenture’s most recent annual report said it had 721,000 employees worldwide in 2022.

“While we continue to hire, especially to support our strategic growth priorities... we initiated actions to streamline our operations,” the company said in a release.

The tech consulting and optimization company hired about 100,000 people in its 2022 fiscal year, which ended in August last year.

“We’re going after structural costs, right, to ensure that we’re in a better position,” chief executive Julie Sweet said on an earnings call Thursday.

“We’ve been dealing with the difficult challenges of compounding wage inflation and we’ve been doing that with pricing but we’ve also been doing that with cost efficiencies and digitizing,” Sweet said.