The sacking of 600 Hutchison Telecommunication paging operators yesterday has left others in the industry fearing for their jobs.
Management said high rents, salaries and other costs had forced the company to move three paging centres to Macau.
Staff were offered three months' salary as a severance payment and an ex gratia amount depending on length of service.
Paging operator Shek Siu-fong, who worked for Hutchison for more than six years, said it would be difficult to find a similar job.
'The whole paging business has given way to cellular phones. It's unlikely I'll be able to find the same job elsewhere,' she said.
The number of telecommunications workers fell from 39,000 in December last year to about 35,000 in July.
Figures from the Office of the Telecommunications Authority show that at the end of July there were about 1.03 million pager users and 1.6 million mobile phone users.