Forbes collected information about large-scale layoffs at ABBYY from various sources, mainly IT employees – company developers with a Russian passport.
Many of the publication’s interlocutors said that the cuts took place during a working video conference with management.
“In a completely brutal and uncharacteristic manner for ABBYY. No reasonable explanations were provided,” an ABBYY developer told the publication.
People were told that their services were no longer needed, and everyone was offered different conditions for terminating cooperation – some received a salary for several months, others – a few weeks.
According to Forbes interlocutors, the Russian staff of ABBYY in Cyprus has thinned the most – source RB.RU told about dismissal from this office. In Belgrade, 80 people were laid off.
Layoffs at ABBYY have passed not based on nationalityKira Kuzmenko, the founder of the recruiting company NEWHR, told the publication, who spoke with an ABBYY top manager. They fired not just Russian employees, but the entire development team – historically, this team consisted of people with Russian passports.
“The rest of the employees (with Russian citizenship), for example, from the business development direction, remained in the company,” Kuzmenko noted.
According to the publication’s interlocutors, ABBYY is firing “expensive” employees in order to hire “cheap” ones from India in their place.
“The largest expense item is payroll (payroll), and the largest payroll is for developers who make a technological product. We started looking at what was happening on the global market and where it was cheaper to hire,” said Kuzmenko.
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 in order 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 withdrew FineReader and two dozen other products from the Russian software registry. In October, the company sent a letter to partners in which it announced the winding down of all operations in Russia and was beginning the process of relocating key Russian personnel to development centers in Cyprus, Hungary and Serbia. Later, the company began liquidating its legal entities in Russia – Abi Production LLC and Abi LLC.
Cover photo: monticello /
Source: rb.ru
