Mass layoff of Russian IT staff spooks emigrants

A round of mass layoffs at ABBYY, the IT company founded by David Yang, a businessman with Russian roots, was one of the big stories in the Russian business world last week. The firings affected only the offices in Cyprus, Serbia and Hungary. Russian citizens were featured heavily among those who were dismissed, according to former employees.

• ABBYY isn’t even a Russian-born company, but rather a Soviet one. David Yang, born in Yerevan to a Chinese father and an Armenian mother, set it up in 1989 while studying at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of Physics and Technology. The company’s first products were the ABBYY FineReader text recognition system and the ABBYY Lingvo electronic dictionary. Today the company is still making products for document processing, now with the help of AI, and also offers services to analyze and optimize business processes. For many years ABBYY maintained a business in Russia but it left the Russian market after the invasion of Ukraine. David Yang himself moved to the USA back in the early 2010s.
• Details of the mass layoffs emerged thanks to a post on X from a former employee of the Cyprus office. Dmitry Nizovtsev, an employee of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, alleged that ABBYY had fired staff members in Hungary, Serbia and Cyprus “because they had Russian passports.”
• Between 200 and 500 people were laid off, Forbes Russia wrote later. Management informed the employees who had lost their jobs on group video calls, during which they were kept on mute and their access to ABBYY’s working systems was restricted, Forbes reported, citing sources. According to one of the developers, the lay-offs were explained by a need to “move on.”
• So far there has been no clear explanation of the mass layoffs. It seems unlikely that staff were axed based on their nationality. One former top manager told Forbes that the layoffs had an “economic, not political background.” Another theory, discussed among the dismissed programmers, is that ABBYY is about to move all three offices to a single operation in India. One former employee said that the company recently held a conference there to attract local talent. “The ‘Russians are being laid off’ thing is probably just hype, it’s just that now the focus is on a different region,” they suggested.

Why the world should care:

The layoffs at ABBYY are another reminder of the fears among Russians that they might lose their jobs for political reasons There is still no significant precedent for this happening, but the concern is real. Many Russians who left the country after the start of the invasion are now working for international companies, and feel they cannot be completely certain that they won’t lose their job because of their passport.