Who is a News & Observer subscriber??

SAS has offered early retirement buyouts to hundreds of senior employees. Here’s why BY ZACHERY EANES UPDATED NOVEMBER 18, 2021 1:52 PM

CARY Cary-based SAS Institute, one of the Triangle’s largest employers, has offered voluntary early retirement buyouts to hundreds of senior employees.

The move comes just a few months after SAS CEO Jim Goodnight rebuffed a $20 billion takeover offer from Broadcom and announced plans for an initial public offering by 2024, The News & Observer previously reported.

In the past few weeks, many SAS employees have taken to LinkedIn to announce that they were retiring from the company.

Shannon Heath, a spokeswoman for SAS, confirmed that the software company had offered the early retirement option to some employees.

Approximately 300 SAS employees have accepted the offer, she said.

David Morgan, a senior system engineer at SAS, told The N&O he was one of the employees who accepted the early retirement offer.

Morgan, 63, said it appeared that most of the people who received the offers were close to retirement age and had at least 10 years of experience.

Morgan, who had worked at SAS since 2011, said that he decided to take the offer after meeting with his financial adviser and determining it was feasible for him to leave.

“I thought it was a very nice offer,” Morgan said, “and the timing was good. With COVID happening, I began to think retirement wasn’t such a bad thing.”

Morgan isn’t retiring completely, though. He recently took a consulting job with the data management company Informatica, which allows him to work remotely from his home in Durham. He expects many other SAS retirees to also take jobs with other technology companies in the coming months.

SAS, one of the largest providers of analytics software, employs around 5,000 people at its headquarters in Cary, and thousands more in offices across the globe.

Heath said employees who turned down the offer remain employed.

Despite the buyouts coming shortly after the announcement of an IPO, SAS said the offer has nothing to do with the company getting ready to go public.

Founded in 1976 while Goodnight was a professor at N.C. State University, SAS has remained a private company its whole existence, though it did flirt with going public in 1999.

“This (early-retirement) benefit, which we have offered in the past and was created based on employee feedback, complements the many ways we invest in our employees to make sure they’re successful in their jobs and in life,” Heath said in an email to The N&O. “It is not related to our path toward IPO-readiness; we continuously evaluate the needs of our employees and business.”

SAS, which has made a profit every year since it was founded, reported revenue of around $3 billion last year, a number that was down around 2% from 2019 because of the pandemic. However, the company said in July that revenue was recovering and had grown 8.4% in the first six months of 2021.

The retirements also come after several notable executives have left the company recently.

In January, Oliver Schabenberger, who was considered the heir apparent to Goodnight, left his role as chief technology officer and chief operating officer to join the growing startup SingleStore, The N&O reported.

And Randy Guard, who was SAS’ chief marketing officer until last year, also decamped for a similar role at the Durham-based fintech startup Spreedly.

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to example.com/newsinnovate.

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article255893376.html#storylink=cpy

Thread regarding SAS Institute layoffs

5 replies (most recent on top)

Post a reply