S3 to lay off 70 in closure
Founded in 1986 by Professor Maurice Whelan with the backing of the IDA and Phillips Electronics, S3 hopes to have 300 employees at the end of the restructuring with the majority of these employed in Dublin and Cork.
S3 says it plans to relocate the vast majority of its employees from the Galway facility to Cork, where S3 has developed a €2.5 million design centre. In all, 40 jobs will go in Ireland.
In a statement, S3 said the changes to the company will help it streamline to meet evolving demand of its target market through consolidation within two business units: to increase focus on key areas such as digital set-top design solutions; and, designs for 3G and WiFi applications. In addition, S3 will build on its established network processing market and has formed a new business unit to focus on this area. S3’s Galway plant will cease operation in 2003 after five years.
It joins other tech companies becoming victims of the downturn in the sector and this latest rationalisation will result in the company having just 300 employees in all sectors, in 1999 the company had 300 engineers alone on its staff.
Phillips Electronics is the majority shareholder and half of S3’s customers are based in the US.
One development being worked on by S3 is the installation of hard-drive technology into video players or TV sets, allowing TV shows to be recorded on to hard drive with 30 to 40 hours of video storage space. It will even familiarise itself with viewing habits and store entire programmes it anticipates to be of interest.
