IN THE PAPERS
In The Papers 26 March
26-03-2009
by Sylvia Leatham
Calls for Eircom to be renationalised | IBM to slash 5,000 staff
The Irish Times reports that the Government is being urged to consider renationalising Eircom after an EU report described key services of the former State company as "expensive and unreliable". The EU Commission report criticised Eircom's wholesale services, saying access for rivals to the network was costly and not dependable. ALTO chairman Ronan Lupton called for the renationalisation of Eircom or investment in the national phone network. Look out for more news on this story in ENN's Weekly Digest on Thursday.
In other news of Eircom, trade unions have accused the telco of reneging on an agreement not to seek voluntary pay cuts from workers until further discussions have taken place about company finances. In a joint statement, the Communications Workers Union, Impact and the Public Service Executive Union "strongly advised" affected members not to agree to a salary reduction. Earlier this month Eircom informed staff that it would seek voluntary pay cuts of 10 percent from managers and 5 percent from graded staff. According to the unions, an agreement was reached with the company to hold back on introducing the cuts for all bar the top 130 managers. Eircom has since extended this to the staff who report to those managers. These workers earn EUR75,000 or more.
The paper also notes that an allegation of copyright breach by Jefferson Computer Ltd over computer training material produced by Bua Training has been settled in the Circuit Court in Dublin. The settlement asserted that the plaintiff, Bua, owned the material and set a five-week deadline for the terms of the agreement to be completed. The full settlement details are confidential and were not disclosed to the court. The case is believed to be one of the first involving copyright infringement of material published on a website in the State.
The same paper reports that mobile data services firm Zamano posted a pre-tax loss of EUR3.622 million for 2008, compared to a pre-tax profit of EUR3.08 million a year earlier. Read more on Zamano's results on ENN.
The paper also says that up to 70 jobs are under threat in Athlone as Dell carries out a review of operations at its Alienware subsidiary, as reported by ENN on Wednesday.
The Irish Independent notes that mobile phone makers have until the end of April to agree on standardising phone chargers, or else face legislation to prevent consumers having to replace chargers when they change phones, the EU's executive body has said. "We are speaking with the industry about a voluntary industry agreement which we think is the quickest solution," said a spokesman for EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen.
The Financial Times reports that Frank Huang, chairman of the World Semiconductor Council, has warned that the aggressive capacity cuts in the D-Ram memory chip sector over the past few months would likely result in a severe shortage by the end of the year that could disrupt shipments of computers and other electronics. The global D-Ram sector faced its biggest crisis last year as industry over-expansion coincided with a drop in demand for PCs. Huang said the industry would begin to recover by the second half of this year, but producers of PCs and other electronic products will face "a shortage bigger than I have ever seen in the past 16 years... this will affect global PC shipments."
The Wall Street Journal says that IBM is to cut around 5,000 US staff, with many of the jobs being transferred to India, according to sources. Big Blue has been steadily building its workforce in India and other locations while reducing the number of US-based staff. The latest round of cuts target the company's global business services unit. Some of the jobs are being eliminated because customers have ended contracts or the company has automated tasks. But employees say in many cases, they have been training IBM workers from India to do work that will now be moved overseas. An IBM spokesman declined to comment.
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