US-headquartered electronic display system firm Daktronics is to close its manufacturing facility in Ennistymon in north Clare with the loss of over 100 jobs.
In an announcement on Wednesday, Daktronics said the closure is anticipated to be substantially complete by the middle of 2028.
The move follows Daktronics’s decision to exit the portion of the business which serves rail, bus, and roadway customers outside of North America.
The company said the action was “intended to reduce fixed costs with a low or negative return outlook and improve manufacturing utilisation across the company’s global manufacturing network”.
President and chief executive officer (CEO) of Daktronics, Ramesh Jayaraman, said “exiting Ireland and aligning our manufacturing capacity will help us manage factory utilisation across the network more effectively, improve workforce productivity, set the stage for further automation, and streamline procurement initiatives”.
“We are taking these steps to meet the evolving needs of our customers,” he said.
The company’s vice-president for international markets, Judd Guthmiller said the decision to cease manufacturing operations in Ireland “has been a very difficult decision and has not been taken lightly, but market realities have made it unavoidable”.
“It does not diminish the enormous contribution our Ireland colleagues have made to the company and to our customers and our focus now is on supporting the team through the closure process in the best way possible.”
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Wednesday’s announcement followed the company confirming at the start of September that it was entering a collective redundancy consultation after it informed its employees that their positions were at risk.
In its statement, the company said leaving Ireland was expected to result in $13.5 million (€12 million) of cumulative pretax charges, including employee-related costs, facility wind-down and equipment-transfer costs, and also potential asset impairments.
Daktronics said, when fully implemented, the closure was expected to generate $7.7 million of annualised pretax savings which, it said, will fully offset the associated implementation costs in less than two years “while contributing to the company’s broader structural cost reduction and margin improvement objectives”.
The most recent accounts for Daktronics Ireland Co Ltd showed that the company was profitable.
For the 12 months to the end of April 2025, the firm recorded a pretax profit of €586,003 as revenues decreased by 8.5 per cent from €17.98 million to €16.44 million.
The company at the end of April 2025 employed 116 and staff costs for the year totalled €6.49 million.
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