Sulake, the company behind virtual world website Habbo Hotel and the popular Finnish chat site IRC-Galleria are to lay off up to 40 of their staff members in Helsinki. The company will initiate negotiations with staff next week and plans to cut employees in Finland by 13 percent. Sulake has a total work force of 300 people worldwide and is based in 13 countries.
According to Sulake the cuts are due to tougher competition online. However some sites are asking where the company’s revenue is actually ending up. According to Arctic Startup Sulake managed to create a one million Euro profit with their €50 million revenue last year. Some bloggers are wondering where that €50m is now going to end up.
Habbo Hotel is a free virtual world for teens and is visited by about about 12 million unique visitors each month and has more than 80 million registered users worldwide. The Finnish IRC-Galleria is the most popular chat site in Finland has about 400 000 registered users.