CD firm to shed 178 jobs in Limerick

There is further bad news on the jobs front in the Mid-West today with the announcement that a Limerick-based firm is to close with the loss of all 178 jobs.

IMAG Optical Storage in Raheen Business Park, which makes recordable and re-writable CDs, is to shed its entire workforce by the end of October.

The company’s Human Resources Manager, Olive Duff, blamed the closure on what she called the “complete collapse” of CD prices worldwide in recent months.

Although the market for CDs had been very depressed recently, news of the entire closure of the company came as a shock to the company’s 178 employees in Raheen.

The jobs will be phased out in two stages with the first wave of redundancies at the end of August.

The remainder of the workforce will be made redundant in October when the company will cease operations.

IMAG - which has been based in Limerick since 1997 was taken over by the Taiwanese firm, CMC, in 2001.

Last month, an Information Technology company based in Limerick, Cognizant Technology Solutions, announced that it was ceasing operations with the loss of all 50 jobs.

The firm in Plassey Technological Park provided software development and maintenance services to clients in the United States.