A number of jobs at eBay’s Dundalk site could be in jeopardy if the company proceeds with plans to lay off as much as 10% of its workforce.
The Wall Street Journal has stated that the sales site could be set to cut back on the number of staff it employs in anticipation of the company’s planned separation with sister company PayPal, who are also based at the Xerox Technology Park in Dundalk.
The job cuts, if they go ahead, are likely to affect each site and could involve around 3,000 people globally being made redundant. The Journal reported that those within the company’s marketplace division would be most at risk.
The report comes just three months after eBay announced it would split its online marketplace from PayPal by mid-2015.
eBay first acquired PayPal, an online payment processing service, in 2002 for $1.5 billion. While it once made sense to pair an online auction house with a payments company, some investors and outsiders called for a split long before the official announcement so the two companies can better focus on their core products.
The eBay facility in Dundalk officially opened its doors in April 2013 and has become one of the town’s biggest employers in that time. As well as having a facility in Dublin, Ireland is its European headquarters and if any job cuts came here they would most likely be in Dundalk given no redundancy payments would have to be made due to the short tenure in which staff have worked there.
