Voxpro in jobs pledge after €150m takeover
By Pádraig Hoare
Cork outsourcing company Voxpro said it has been taken over by Canadian IT giant Telus in a deal estimated at €150m, and said that not only are jobs safe but it could expand its operations.
Voxpro, founded by Cork husband and wife Dan and Linda Kiely, is one of the country’s biggest employers. It has more than 2,000 staff at its Blackrock headquarters in the city, and has hundreds of more people employed in Dublin, Bucharest, the US, and Philippines.
Not only are the current jobs safe, but the deal means the company could grow further in the future, according to a Voxpro spokesman.
The company specialises in providing multilingual tech support and business outsourcing services.
Voxpro provides clients with customer contact services, call-centre services, 24/7 call answering, as well as technical support services in more than a dozen languages.
Voxpro has 300 clients in the domestic and international markets. They include SMEs and leading multinationals such as Airbnb, Etsy, Stripe, and Google.
Last year, Voxpro officially opened a Dublin office, with plans to hire 400 people.
At the opening, Mr Kiely said the company had plans to grow overseas this year.
The Telus deal, however, marks an end to plans for the company to stay independent and float its shares on the stock market.
Mr Kiely said last year that those plans were still alive but were unlikely to happen for some time.
Under the deal with Telus, Voxpro will keep its name and will bring the staff count at both firms to almost 28,000 people.
Mr Kiely will stay with the company, it said, under Telus president and chief executive Jeffrey Puritt.
Voxpro has been heralded as one of Ireland’s biggest business success stories, growing from a handful of staff since it was founded almost 20 years ago.
The company began with six employees on Marlboro St, Cork City.
Former taoiseach Enda Kenny was a regular visitor to Voxpro as it announced new jobs over the course of the last seven years, heralding the company as a symbol of Irish entrepreneurial spirit.
Mr Kiely has become one of the country’s most vocal business figures in recent years.
He had also warned, however, about uneven regional economic growth, citing shortages of housing in Cork which could hamper the city’s recovery.
He said the rental crisis in Cork, which has seen prices in the city spike in recent years, was preventing Voxpro from holding on to some of the best “young, mobile, and multilingual workforce”.
Telus is a global business and IT outsourcing company with offices based in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, central America, and Philippines.
It provides voice, email, chat, and social media for its corporate clients in sectors such as information technology, financial services, and finance technology, as well as gaming, travel and hospitality, and healthcare.
About 70% of its business is done through English, with half of the support services provided by phone, and the other half by online or email.
Mr Kiely said: “It’s an extremely special day for us and for all of our partners, team members, and indeed, everyone in the Voxpro community.”
