PrestaShop opens redundancy proceedings eight weeks after its acquisition by Cyber_Folks closed

Eight weeks. That is how long it took between the ink drying on a $63.4 million acquisition and the opening of formal redundancy proceedings at one of Europe’s most recognized open-source e-commerce platforms.

PrestaShop‘s leadership published the announcement on April 10, 2026, confirming the company had opened a PSE, the formal French statutory process that governs group redundancies at companies with more than 50 employees. CEO Mikołaj Król and Managing Director Olivier Binet addressed the news directly, describing the move as a strategic realignment driven by market competition and evolving merchant demands rather than technology replacing headcount. The number of positions affected and which departments fall within scope remain undisclosed. PrestaShop employs roughly 347 people.

The PSE process itself is worth understanding before drawing conclusions. French labor law requires formal consultation with the company’s works council, negotiation of a social plan covering outplacement and severance terms, and regulatory approval before any dismissals actually happen. That process runs several months in most cases, and the company stated explicitly that nothing is final until the authorities issue their approval.

What the timeline does reveal is that this process did not begin after the deal closed. Headcount analysis, legal preparation, and works council notification sequencing all require weeks of groundwork. The decisions that are now being consulted formally were formed while Cyber_Folks was finishing up the deal.

The acquisition brought PrestaShop into a three-tier product structure under a single ownership group. Shoper handles the Polish SMB market at the entry level. PrestaShop occupies the mid-market open-source layer. Sylius, whose founders exchanged their shares for a 21 percent stake in Cyber_Pixel as part of the deal, covers enterprise and headless commerce. Combined annual GMV across the group sits around $41.3 billion.

The hosting partner question sits in the background of all this without a clear answer yet. Hostinger holds preferred partner status in PrestaShop’s official program, with A2 Hosting, IONOS, and regional providers across France, Spain, Poland, and Italy also participating. Cyber_Folks runs its own cloud infrastructure and competes in the same SMB segment those partners serve. Whether the new ownership maintains those relationships as they stand is a question the April 10 announcement does not address.

Active PrestaShop store counts dropped from approximately 219,000 in early 2022 to around 168,700 by early 2026.