Condé Nast lays off 30 in Delaware

Condé Nast has laid off 30 employees in its downtown Wilmington office, according to sources familiar with the company.

The New York publisher's Wilmington location, at 1313 N. Market St., is home to its Shared Services Center. Shared Services is responsible for handling Condé Nast's accounting, payroll, human resources, vendor invoices and information technology.

Of the 30 employees who lost their jobs, 15 had their positions eliminated. The remaining 15 jobs were outsourced to Costa Rica. Auxis LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based management consultant that specializes in outsourcing is overseeing the Costa Rica transition. In fact, two Wilmington-based Condé Nast employees were said to have flown to Costa Rica for the purpose of training workers.

Some of the Condé Nast workers were terminated immediately, while others will be phased out between Oct. 2 and Dec. 1.

The layoffs were said to be isolated within Delaware and not part of larger job cuts throughout the company. Condé Nast now has 130 employees in Delaware after the reductions.

A Condé Nast spokeswoman declined to comment.

A division of Advance Publications, Condé Nast publishes more than 20 magazines including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Golf Digest and GQ.

Condé Nast opened the Shared Services Center in 2003. At the time, the company had roughly 200 employees working in the Hercules Building. Wilmington Mayor Dennis Williams honored Condé Nast's decade in Wilmington in 2013 when he proclaimed June 10 as Condé Nast day in the city.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Delaware location, Condé Nast executives produced a video touting its worker's accomplishments. The Shared Services Center processed 200,000 customer service calls, 360,000 print advertising invoices and 425,000 expense reports in the decade between 2003 and 2013, according to the video. During the same period, the Delaware office collected roughly $15 billion in cash from advertising customers.

In the video Condé Nast President Robert A. Sauerberg Jr. praised the Shared Services Center's efforts.

"Congratulations to the Delaware Condé Nast team," Sauerberg said at the time. "Thank you for a decade of great success, and we look forward to many, many more decades."

Since the video, Condé Nast has reduced its Delaware footprint. Last year, the company abandoned its data center at a Pencader Business Park near Glasgow. The data center housed 500 servers; 100 database servers; and over 100 switches, routers and firewalls, according to April 2014 published reports.

The 67,000-square-foot warehouse at 801 Pencader Drive was vacated after the company opted to transfer Amazon Cloud services. Condé Nast used the property to host its online titles such as Reddit and the website for print publications, including Vanity Fair.

Contact Jeff Mordock at (302) 324-2786, on Twitter @JeffMordockTNJ or jmordock@delawareonline.com.