Russian Sberbank Starts Mass Lay-Offs Following Gazprom
13- 22.01.2025, 12:14
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Developers went first.
Sberbank has launched a large-scale campaign to reduce staff in its subsidiaries: Kuper, MegaMarket, SberLogistics and Samokat. All four divisions are part of Ecom.tech, a team that develops e-commerce solutions.
First of all, the bank decided to get rid of programmers and developers, CNews reports. The head of one of the departments in Ecom.tech told the publication that Kuper had already fired 20% of IT specialists (about 200 people out of 1,000), explaining this by “budget savings and orders from above.”
According to him, employees are being offered to leave by mutual agreement of parties. “They literally said: write two lists: the first wave is 45%, the second is another 9%. And many managers did this,” he added.
Another source in Ecom.tech said that layoffs began back in December, and MegaMarket alone is preparing to cut up to 25% of employees. At the same time, there is no official announcement from Sberbank. “They come verbally with an offer to leave by mutual agreement, and then there is bargaining over the number of salaries paid as compensation,” he said, specifying that they usually pay “two or three salaries” to ordinary employees and “five or six” to managers. The source also noted that at Kuper, where every fifth IT specialist has already been fired, the layoffs “will be minimal,” since it is a “more successful product.”
The Sbertech developer who filed the resignation letter said that they met with him in early December and told him that “by order from above, they are “optimizing” management in unprofitable areas.” According to him, for now the bank plans to refuse the services of those who work on outsourcing, and this is a third of the team.
“Outsourcing companies found out that their contracts would not be renewed from December a couple of weeks [before], but the employees were kept in the dark until the last minute — apparently, they thought it would clear up. As a result, they found out one day that they no longer had a project,” he stated.
According to him, the development teams are now being merged and programmers are being transferred to vacant positions, but there are not enough jobs for everyone. According to the Telegram channel “IT Workers’ Union”, which has started receiving complaints from employees of Sberbank’s subsidiaries, companies are expecting a reduction of 30% to 50% of their staff.
Experts believe that Russian IT specialists are facing the consequences of economic instability caused by the war with Ukraine. Companies are massively laying off such specialists due to the breakdown of trade relations, the rising cost of imported technologies and the record key rate of the Central Bank (21%), which have complicated the planning and implementation of long-term IT projects. “The main reason for layoffs is the unpaid costs of overvalued IT specialists caused by the decline in business,” explained Maria Rukavishnikova, a technology entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Getmobit.
Earlier it became known that Gazprom, which lost the European market and suffered hundreds of billions of rubles in losses due to the war and sanctions, is preparing large-scale layoffs. In particular, the company plans to cut 1,600 employees at its head office. Deputy Chairman of the Management Board Elena Ilyukhina explained the need for such a step by the “challenges” Gazprom was facing, and the fact that the monopoly needs to “optimize costs at all levels of management and production processes.”
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