Accenture layoff: 7,000 employees to be fired in India as part of global cuts

In a global move to let go of 19,000 people or 2.5% of its global workforce, Tech consultancy Accenture plans to fire at least 7,000 of its about 350,000 employees in India in the next 18 months.

In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Dublin-headquartered company said it expects to incur $1.5 billion in costs as a result of the downsizing, including $1.2 billion directly related to the layoffs.

About half of the jobs lost are in administrative or support functions, not in areas that lead to billing of customers, the company said.

"While we continue to hire, especially to support our strategic growth priorities... we initiated actions to streamline our operations," the company said in a release.

Accenture's most recent annual report said it had 721,000 employees in 2022.

The tech consulting and optimization company hired about 100,000 people in its 2022 fiscal year, which ended in August last year.

"We're going after structural costs, right, to ensure that we're in a better position," chief executive Julie Sweet said on an earnings call Thursday.

"We've been dealing with the difficult challenges of compounding wage inflation and we've been doing that with pricing but we've also been doing that with cost efficiencies and digitizing," Sweet said.