TROUBLED IRISH electronic payments firm Payzone is believed to be seeking 27 compulsory redundancies among its 93 workers at its group support office in Sandyford, Dublin.
Staff were informed of the move at a meeting in Dublin’s Montrose Hotel on Wednesday.
The collapse in consumer sales here and in Britain has been disastrous for a business that’s built around retail transactions, mobile top-ups and ATM cash withdrawals.
This is the latest piece of bad news for a company that listed on the AIM junior stock market in late 2007, following the merger of Dublin-based Alphyra and Cardpoint, an ATM operator in the UK.
Over the past 14 months, Payzone has ousted chief executive John Nagle and finance director John Williamson, and seen chairman Bob Thian step down.
The trio were the architects of the merger.
It has also sold its businesses in France, Italy and Spain and restructured and rebranded the Cardpoint division in Britain. Speculation persists that it will sell its operation in Germany.
To that you can add losses last year of €206 million and borrowings of €293 million. Its share price has crashed from 76 pence at IPO time to about two pence.
Its market value is just £7.9 million.
