The Malaga-based tech company Magnific, known until April as Freepik, has informed its staff of the opening of an Employment Regulation File (ERE) that could affect nearly a third of its workers in Spain, as part of the transformation the company has undergone in recent years to become a global artificial intelligence platform.
The company, founded in Malaga by Joaquín Cuenca and the brothers Alejandro and Pablo Blanes, currently has about 350 employees in Spain, of which around 250 work in the province of Malaga, in addition to another hundred spread across other offices, including the one in San Francisco (United States).
According to the company, the file does not respond to economic reasons, but to the reorganization derived from its change in business model. In just three years, the firm has gone from being a platform specialized in image banks and graphic resources to focusing on the generation of audiovisual content through artificial intelligence.
The union rejects the layoffs
The initial proposal presented by the company contemplates 111 layoffs out of a workforce of 337 employees in Spain, which would raise the percentage of those affected to 32.9%.
CCOO, the majority union on the works council, has shown outright rejection of the measure. The organization considers that there is no proportionality between the proposed reorganization and the volume of planned layoffs, in addition to questioning the technical and organizational justification alleged by the company.
The union argues that the transformation towards artificial intelligence has been a strategic decision driven by management itself and calls for alternatives such as training plans, professional retraining, and internal redeployment to preserve as many jobs as possible.
Likewise, it regrets that a company considered one of the great technological benchmarks to emerge from Malaga and which aspires to lead the AI sector opts for a labor adjustment of these dimensions.
From Freepik to Magnific
The company announced its corporate identity change in April of this year, abandoning the historic Freepik brand to adopt the name Magnific, a platform specializing in artificial intelligence tools for professional creators.
The operation culminated a transformation process initiated years ago and reinforced after the acquisition of Magnific in 2024. According to data provided by the company itself, the group currently reaches 230 million dollars in annual recurring revenue and exceeds one million paying subscribers.
Management maintains that the sector is undergoing a profound technological revolution and that the expansion of artificial intelligence is significantly reducing the costs and production times of digital content.