SINGAPORE – SPH Media announced on Nov 4 the layoff of 34 employees, amid a restructuring of the company’s technology division.
The cuts will affect technology workers across various teams and ranks, and account for about 10 per cent of employees in the technology division.
They come as different functions in the technology division are streamlined, resulting in job redundancies, said SPH Media chief operating officer Loh Yuh Yiing and chief technology officer Kaythaya Maw in an e-mail broadcast to staff at 9.25am.
“This was a difficult decision that we have had to make,” they added.
In a statement to the media, the company, which publishes The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao, said the decision was made after careful consideration.
It added that the company was committed to supporting the affected employees and providing them with comprehensive severance packages that adhere to tripartite guidelines, career coaching, job placement assistance, as well as counselling support to help ease their transition.
SPH Media, which was formed in 2021 as a company limited by guarantee after the former Singapore Press Holdings was restructured and delisted, had accelerated its digital transformation over the past three years.
Given this, an “urgent and aggressive” ramp up in various areas of technology was necessary to build back earlier years of underinvestment and to keep pace with the demands of the evolving digital media landscape, said Ms Loh in her e-mail.
“It has not been easy for our colleagues, executing and delivering on all fronts of Tech these past three years,” she added.
However, while the ramp up was needed to catalyse the earlier phase of transformation, it is not a level that the company can afford to sustain beyond 2024, she said.
Expenditure on technology currently makes up nearly 20 per cent of SPH’s annual costs.
Payroll-related expenditure accounted for nearly two-thirds of this.
Ms Loh noted that globally, media companies continue to grapple with persistent decline in revenue and the growing cost of keeping up with fast-changing audience demands in digital media.
She said: “SPH too, faces similar pressures to find a sustainable way forward.”
Against this backdrop, the company had sought first to tighten non-payroll expenditures as it reviewed its technology operations and cost structures in the past three months, said Ms Loh.
While these efforts did help to bring down the overall expenditure partially, adjustments to manpower could not be avoided, and the company also reduced its reliance on contract resources where business needs have evolved, Ms Loh added.
She said job redundancies were considered only as a last resort.
Describing it as a difficult decision, she said the cuts together with the restructuring will bring the technology division to a more sustainable steady-state.
“Our priority is to extend care and support to all affected colleagues as we navigate this challenging transition,” she added.
She also said that there were currently no plans for “further exercises of this nature”, though “regular review and resource optimisation” would continue to be necessary as the company adapts to changing business needs.
“Going forward, our focus will be to steady the ship as we transit towards a more sustainable level of Tech operations and expenditure,” she added.
Along with the layoffs, Ms Loh also announced changes to the technology division’s organisational structure, which will take effect from Nov 5.
The division will be restructured into three broad departments – the CTO Office, the Information Technology department and the Product and Engineering department.
Mr Jensen Boey will lead the CTO office, supporting Mr Maw; Mr Christopher Lim will lead the Information Technology department; and Mr Maw will lead the Product and Engineering team in the interim.
In addition, the current data team, comprising data science, analytics, and data engineering functions, will be moved out of the technology division as a standalone business insights and analytics department under the corporate and operations pillar of the company.
This department will report directly to Ms Loh, to inform strategy at an organisationwide level, she said.
“This restructuring of Tech departments will enable clearer leadership focus and accountability for outcomes in the areas of Tech administration, IT infrastructure and digital product development,” she added.