Kainos boss says he regrets redundancies at IT firm

The boss of Northern Ireland’s largest IT business says he “deeply regrets” the 190 redundancies the firm made earlier this year.

Brendan Mooney was speaking as Kainos announced its annual pre-tax profit had fallen by 15% from £77m to £66m.

That included £8.4m of one-off restructuring costs related to the redundancies.

The job losses should save the firm about £19m a year of which about two thirds will be invested in growth areas like AI.

The remainder will be allocated to staff-related cost increases, including pay rises and higher UK National Insurance contributions.

Mr Mooney said the weaker performance of the business last year partly reflected a pause on government spending decisions around the time of last year’s general election.

The UK public sector is the firm’s single biggest market.

“It caught us by surprise,” he said of the election timing.

That reflects the expectation that the last prime minister would wait until the end of 2024 rather than holding the election in the summer.

“The whole of the second half of last year was basically very slow for the public sector, and no real decision making,” he said.

Mr Mooney said things had since picked up but the June spending review would be key for understanding government intentions to spend on digital services over the next few years.

Kainos also saw a significant fall in its commercial sector revenues last year which Mr Mooney said is being addressed with new approach which included bidding for “smaller more agile engagements” rather than relying on larger contracts from a few big clients.

The major bright spot in the company’s performance was its Workday products division.

Workday is a suite of financial management and HR software.

Kainos helps companies deploy and manage Workday, as well as creating its own Workday-compatible products.