Computacenter has furloughed one in ten workers including engineers, project managers and consultants.
Computacenter said it had been off its feet as businesses reacted to COVID-19 by asking staff to work from home, even before the UK government imposed a lockdown on 23 March.
“There has been a marked difference in need from customer to customer dependent on which sector their business is in. There has been a surge in demand from many of our customers to enable business continuity particularly around home working and network resilience.
“Conversely, particularly in the industrial sector, where a large number of our customers have had to cease production, our engineers and consultants are unable to work. To mitigate the cost of carrying these staff, but retaining them for the long term, we have placed approximately 10 percent of Computacenter’s employees across Europe, on wage subsidy programmes utilising various government initiatives.”
Around 15,000 people are employed by the group, and due to the furloughing, Computacenter has rightly cancelled the payment of a final dividend for 2019, saying it was “prudent” to do so. “The company will continue to monitor the current crisis and resume distributing cash to shareholders as soon as it is appropriate”, it said.
