On April 10, 2026, PrestaShop published a message from its leadership announcing it has opened a PSE (Plan de sauvegarde de l’emploi), the formal French statutory process that governs group redundancies in companies with 50 or more employees. The announcement comes eight weeks after Cyber_Pixel, a subsidiary of Polish hosting and cloud group Cyber_Folks, completed its €53.7 million acquisition of PrestaShop on February 18, 2026. The number of positions affected and which departments are targeted have not been disclosed. PrestaShop employs approximately 347 people, according to its LinkedIn company page.

What a PSE Is and What It Means

A PSE is not an immediate termination event. Under French labor law (Code du Travail, Articles L1233-61 to L1233-64), any company with more than 50 employees that plans to eliminate at least 10 positions within 30 days is required to open a PSE. The process involves formal consultation with the company’s works council (Comité Social et Économique), negotiation of a social plan covering outplacement support and severance terms, and approval from the DREETS regional employment authority before any dismissals can take place. The process typically runs several months. Today’s announcement is the opening of that process, not the completion of it.

In the announcement, CEO Mikołaj Król and Managing Director Olivier Binet wrote: “The ecommerce landscape, however, has changed profoundly. Competition has intensified, merchant expectations have evolved, and the pace of innovation has accelerated. To continue leading in this environment and keep building the product and services that merchants need, we have to make sure our organization is structured to move forward with the market.” The announcement explicitly stated: “this restructuring is not driven by artificial intelligence replacing talents. It reflects a strategic realignment in response to the realities of our company, our market and our competition.”

On the process itself, the company was explicit that no outcomes are yet determined: “Until that process is complete and the administration has issued its approval, nothing is final. We will not get ahead of that process, and we will not speculate about outcomes that have not yet been determined.” The number of positions affected and which departments are targeted were not disclosed in the announcement.

Polish hosting group Cyber_Folks acquires PrestaShop

The Acquisition Context

Cyber_Folks, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and headquartered in Poznan, Poland, acquired PrestaShop through a subsidiary called Cyber_Pixel. The deal was signed December 11, 2025 and closed February 18, 2026, with a purchase price of €53.7 million subject to net debt adjustments. The sellers were MBE Worldwide (later rebranded to Fortidia), which had acquired PrestaShop in 2021 and chose to divest it to focus on its core logistics business.

The transaction brought the Sylius founders into the structure as minority partners: the founders of Sylius, a Symfony-native PHP e-commerce framework positioned at the enterprise tier, exchanged their Sylius shares for a 21 percent stake in Cyber_Pixel. The result is a three-tier product stack under a single ownership group: Shoper (Cyber_Folks’ Polish SMB SaaS platform) at the entry level, PrestaShop in the mid-market open-source layer, and Sylius at the enterprise and headless commerce tier. Combined GMV across the group’s platforms is approximately €35 billion annually.

A PSE eight weeks after closing is consistent with post-acquisition consolidation. Cyber_Folks employs over 1,000 people across its existing operations. PrestaShop’s organizational structure included significant headcount in sales, marketing, and customer support functions that overlap with Cyber_Folks’ existing capacity. The company’s core development team, by some accounts, represented a small fraction of the total headcount relative to its commercial and administrative functions.

PrestaShop’s Platform Trajectory

The timing of the restructuring follows a period of measurable store count decline. Active PrestaShop installations tracked by StoreLeads peaked at approximately 219,000 stores in Q1 2022. By Q1 2026 the figure stood at approximately 168,700, a loss of roughly 50,000 active stores or approximately 23 percent over four years. Merchants departing PrestaShop have moved primarily to WooCommerce and Shopify.

The new ownership has moved quickly on product direction. PrestaShop 9.0 shipped in June 2025, completing the core Symfony 6.4 migration. PrestaShop 9.1 followed, introducing the Hummingbird 2.0 theme as the default and experimental versions of multi-carrier shipping and a redesigned discount engine. At a public Live Update on March 31, 2026, the new leadership team, CEO Mikołaj Król, COO Damian Murawski, and Managing Director Olivier Binet, presented a roadmap focused on reducing technical debt, completing long-absent features, and aligning the architecture toward headless and API-first patterns consistent with Sylius’s design.

The translations.prestashop.com service was shut down on April 1, 2026 for legacy PrestaShop versions (1.6 and older), the first visible infrastructure cut under new ownership.

Is PrestaShop’s February 2026 security alert linked to over 21 million records allegedly leaked from the Addons Marketplace?

PrestaShop’s Hosting Partners Now Report to a Competing Hosting Group

PrestaShop’s official partner program lists Hostinger as preferred hosting partner, with A2 Hosting, IONOS, and dozens of regional providers holding partner status in France, Spain, Poland, and Italy, the markets where PrestaShop store concentration is highest. Those relationships were negotiated with a company whose ownership had no direct stake in the hosting business. That is no longer the case.

Cyber_Folks runs its own cloud infrastructure in Poland and operates Shoper, an SaaS e-commerce platform serving the same SMB merchant segment that PrestaShop hosts. The same group that now controls PrestaShop’s partner program, Addons Marketplace certification, and roadmap decisions is also a hosting provider competing for the same European customers. Whether Cyber_Folks manages that position by maintaining the existing partner ecosystem or by redirecting hosting recommendations toward its own infrastructure is a question the PSE announcement does not answer. The structure now exists for either outcome.

The eight-week timeline between acquisition close and PSE opening is its own signal. A PSE at this scale requires preparation that predates the announcement: headcount analysis by department, legal filing preparation, and works council notification sequencing. That work begins before an acquisition closes, not after. The organizational decisions now entering formal consultation were being made while Cyber_Folks was completing the transaction.

The April 10 statement addressed the continuity question directly: “Our commitment to our merchants and partners is unchanged. Our teams remain focused on delivering the product and service you depend on. Your contacts, your support channels, and your roadmap visibility are not affected by this process.” Contacts and channels can be reassigned without being eliminated. Whether the commercial and partner-facing functions that support the hosting channel are in scope will not be known until the DREETS issues its approval and the process concludes.