facebook rss twitter

BT to axe 15,000 more staff as losses mount

by Scott Bicheno on 14 May 2009, 09:39

Tags: British Telecom (LON:BT.A)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qar7y

Add to My Vault: x

Global disservices

The extent to which BT's global services division drags the whole company into the red grows with every quarter.

In its latest quarterly earnings report, BT announced it was taking charges of £1.3 billion on the division, apparently as a result of seriously over-estimating the amount of money it would make from its services contracts. It's also managed to move its pension pot from a pre tax surplus of £2.8 bn a year ago to a deficit of £4 bn.

All this has resulted in a quarterly loss of £1.279 bn and an annual loss of £134 m. As a consequence, BT has vowed to repeat the 15,000 redundancies it managed last year. BT employees must be hoping it treats them the same was it did the boss of the chronically mismanaged Global Services division when he was sacked last year.

"Three out of four of BT's lines of business have performed well in spite of fierce competition and the global economic downturn," said chief exec Ian Livingston. "However this achievement has been overshadowed by the unacceptable performance of BT Global Services and the resulting charges we have taken."

There was some potential good news for UK broadband, however. "We will examine doubling the pace of the roll out of super fast broadband next year within existing capital expenditure plans, bringing fibre based services within the reach of more than a million homes and businesses and securing the jobs of a thousand BT people," said Livingstone.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 2 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
15,000 staff to be axed in the UK or globally? Or does that mean they will axe 15,000 UK jobs and employ 5,000 staff in India to cut costs?

I would love to get more details on this.
DeludedGuy
15,000 staff to be axed in the UK or globally? Or does that mean they will axe 15,000 UK jobs and employ 5,000 staff in India to cut costs?

I would love to get more details on this.

This is the section that addresses job losses in the press release: "As part of the cost savings initiatives we have reduced the number of full time employees by around 5,000. In addition to this, the number of indirect employees working through agencies or third party contractors was reduced by around 10,000, giving a reduction in our total labour resource of some 15,000 in the year. We expect further reductions of a similar level next year. We have sought to retain our permanent workforce through redeployment and re-training."

Not much help regarding the UK I know.