(Bloomberg) — Siemens AG plans to cut about 7,400 jobs worldwide as Chief Executive Officer Joe Kaeser tries to reduce costs at Europe’s biggest engineering company, said a person familiar with the matter.
The cuts, representing about 2 percent of Siemens’s global workforce, may be announced as early as this week, two people said, asking not to be identified as the plan is not public yet. About 3,300 of the job reductions may affect Siemens’s German operations, two people familiar with the matter said. A Siemens representative declined to comment.
“They are mostly white collar employees with higher per head salaries and indirect costs,” London-based JP Morgan analyst Andreas Willi said by e-mail, citing computers and office space as associated costs. The “number makes sense and is in-line with what I expected.”
Kaeser said last year that Siemens needs to eliminate jobs as he seeks to slash about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) in costs by creating a leaner divisional structure and simplifying regional operations. He had said that as many as 11,600 positions could be affected in the overhaul, and that the final headcount loss would be negotiated with labor representatives.
Streamlining Siemens
