Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson on Friday said it would cut 2,000 more jobs after it swung to a loss of 293 million euros (384 million dollars) in the first quarter of the year.
“The additional cost saving programme announced today will include a further reduction in the global workforce of approximately 2,000 people,” the company said in a statement.
Source: AFP
Qantas Airways Ltd., Australia’s largest carrier, forecast a record second-half loss and will cut 1,750 jobs as demand for business and first-class travel plunges on the global recession.
The job cuts, equivalent to about 5 percent of the workforce, are the deepest since Chief Executive Officer Alan Joyce took over five months ago. Qantas became the latest carrier to defer delivery of the Airbus SAS A380, the world’s largest commercial plane, amid the recession and a drop in premium travel since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. last year.
Source: Bloomberg
Swiss bank UBS will announce more job cuts soon, with staff in Switzerland and departments like marketing to be hit hard, newspapers reported on Sunday.
Citing several unnamed sources, the Sonntagszeitung newspaper said managers had already started telling their staff about job losses, with departments like marketing and support functions hardest hit.
Source: Reuters
Australian mortgage services provider Commonwealth Bank of Australia late Sunday announced that it would cut 400 jobs at its wholly-owned subsidiary Bank of Western Australia Ltd or Bankwest across Australia. The bank cited the deteriorating national and Western Australian economies as well as a high cost base as the reason for implementing these job cuts.
According to Bankwest, around 250 back-office support roles on the west coast and 150 on the east coast will be made redundant this year.
Source: RTTNews
At least 40 Arab Israel Railways workers received pink slips on Sunday, effective the beginning of April. They are losing their jobs after Israel Railways changed its employment terms, and said it would employ only army veterans in the positions these workers held.
The workers serve as lookouts at level crossings, to prevent collisions between trains and vehicles. The job does not involve bearing arms.
Source: Haaretz
Plantronics Inc. plans to cut about 670 positions and close its manufacturing plant in Suzhou, China to improve profitability of its Bluetooth headset product line, the company said Thursday.
Santa Cruz[,Calif.]-based Plantronics (NYSE: PLT) said it will outsource production of Bluetooth headsets to an existing supplier in China, where most of the job cuts will take place.
Tempers are flaring across Europe as the economic pain deepens and more people lose their jobs.
Luc Rousselet, the manager of a 3M factory in France, was barricaded in an office for a second day by workers demanding better severance packages for 110 employees who are being laid off.
In Scotland, vandals smashed at least three windows on the ground floor of Fred Goodwin’s (the former chief executive of the ailing Royal Bank of Scotland) house in an affluent suburb of Edinburgh and damaged a black Mercedes S600 parked in the driveway. Mr. Goodwin was not in the house at the time and no one was hurt, but the incident alarmed Britain’s business community.
The author of an e-mail message sent anonymously to a local newspaper on Wednesday claimed responsibility for the damage and said: “We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money and living in luxury while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless.”
Source: New York Times
Qantas Airways Ltd, Australia’s top airline, moved to rein in costs with another round of job cuts, this time targeting its senior management team, to help it ride out the global financial crisis.
Qantas will shed 90 top management positions adding to 1,500 job cuts announced last year, it said on Wednesday.
The airline said in a statement it would a maintain a salary freeze and make a number of role changes for remaining managers.
Source: Reuters
According to Reuters, Yahoo News: “IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc for at least $6.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, in a deal that could bolster their computer server products against rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co.
That would translate into a premium of about 100 percent over Sun’s Nasdaq closing price Tuesday of $4.97 a share, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter.”
“Sun stock is down 71 percent in the last 52 weeks, a far cry from an all-time high of $258.75 that it touched during the dot-com boom. The company — which is shedding up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of its workforce — reported a net loss of $209 million for its second quarter ended December 28, compared with year-earlier net profit of $260 million. Revenue fell 11 percent to $3.22 billion.”
Nokia said Tuesday that it planned to eliminate 1,700 jobs, roughly 3 percent of its work force, as demand for phones continued to sag.
The company said 700 workers would be laid off in Finland and the rest elsewhere in Europe, Asia and North America. The layoffs are to take place in Nokia’s devices and markets divisions, which produce, market and sell mobile phones, and in a unit responsible for long-term corporate strategy.
Source: NYTimes
More than 30,000 government employees — about 14 percent of the public work force — could lose their jobs and new taxes will be introduced as Puerto Rico attempts to shore up its ailing economy, the governor of the U.S. island territory announced Tuesday.
In a half-hour televised address, Gov. Luis Fortuno outlined a plan to cut a long-bloated work force — excluding police officers and teachers — and institute new taxes to increase revenue on the cash-strapped island, which is in its third year of recession.
Source: Baltimore Sun
Vale Inco Ltd. said Tuesday it will cut more than 400 white-collar jobs in Canada as it continues to restructure its operations amid slumping nickel prices.
The Toronto-based miner said it will cut 900 jobs worldwide, mainly from its corporate, management and business support functions, and the bulk of layoffs in Canada will fall at its major nickel operations in northern Ontario.
Source: The Canadian Press
U.S. Steel Corp. announced Tuesday that it would further scale back operations, affecting about 1,500 workers.
In the next month, the Pittsburgh-based company (NYSE: X) will idle its finishing and coking operations at Hamilton Works and the steelmaking and finishing operations at Lake Erie Works, both in Ontario. Coking production, the baking of coal to create the steel ingredient coke, will continue at Lake Erie Works, the company said.
U.S. Steel will continue to concentrate production at its Mon Valley Works outside of Pittsburgh; Gary Works in Gary, Ind.; and Fairfield Works near Birmingham, Ala., the company said.
Source: Dayton Business Journal
ITV Plc, the U.K.’s biggest commercial broadcaster, said it will cut a further 600 jobs and omit dividend payments after posting a 2.56 billion-pound ($3.6 billion) net loss for 2008 amid dropping advertising sales.
ITV, whose shows include “Britain’s Got Talent” and “X Factor,” is under pressure because advertisers are cutting budgets as the U.K. economy slumps. Broadcasters are also struggling to expand their Internet businesses to make up for a decline in traditional advertising. Ad revenue will probably fall 17 percent in the first quarter, ITV said today.
Source: Bloomberg
UK manufacturing sector could see 140,000 job cuts in the year because of the economic downturn, the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) said on Monday.
The engineering and manufacturing body, which surveyed 782 firms, forecast that manufacturing output would fall by 8.6% in 2009 and grow only 0.2% in 2009. Engineering output is set to shrink by 10.9% this year and rise by 0.9% next year.
Source ShareCast
LayoffBlog.com 