Accenture has announced plans to reduce costs by cutting 2.5 percent of its global workforce, which amounts to approximately 19,000 jobs, over the next 18 months.
The Irish-American professional services company intends to spend $1.2 billion on severance packages and another $300 million on consolidating office space. The majority of the job cuts will affect back-office staff.
Accenture, which has 738,000 employees worldwide, stated in its latest quarterly report that it will continue to hire but will also streamline operations and transform non-billable corporate functions to save costs.
The company lowered its revenue growth forecast for the 2023 fiscal year to between 8 percent and 10 percent from its previous estimate of between 8 percent and 11 percent.
In the tech industry, hundreds of thousands of employees have been laid off since the end of last year due to a decrease in demand resulting from high inflation and increasing interest rates.
Accenture’s rivals such as McKinsey and KPMG are also cutting their workforce to save money. KPMG reportedly announced that it will cut close to 2% of its US workforce due to an expected decrease in client demand. Additionally, reports also revealed that McKinsey may lay off up to 2,000 non-consulting employees in one of its largest rounds of job cuts ever.
Last week, Facebook-parent Meta announced that it intends to carry out another round of substantial job cuts, resulting in the layoff of 10,000 more employees. Earlier this week, Amazon also revealed that it will cut 9,000 more jobs across various business units.
