Global consulting giant, Accenture, announced that it plans to let go of 19,000 employees in response to the gloomy economic situation.
According to a filing on Thursday, the Irish-American professional services company plans to allocate $1.2 billion towards severance packages for reducing its workforce by 2.5% over the next 18 months. Additionally, the company intends to spend $300 million to consolidate its office space.
The current downsizing would affect 2.5% of its workforce (738,000), with more than half of the affected roles from the back-office function.
The company said that it continues to hire, but had “initiated actions to streamline [its] operations and transform our non-billable corporate functions to reduce costs.”
Accenture reported financial results for the second quarter of fiscal 2023, ended February 28, 2023, with revenues of $15.8 billion, an increase of 5% in U.S. dollars and 9% in local currency over the same period last year.
However it downgraded its revenue growth outlook for the 2023 fiscal year to between 8% and 10%, from its previous estimate of between 8% and 11%.
Last month, consulting giant KPMG announced in an internal memo that it would cut almost 2% of its US workforce as it anticipated waning client demand as per a Financial Times report.
Bloomberg reported last month that Mckinsey is also likely to let go of about 2,000 employees in one of its biggest round of layoffs ever.
