Industrial machinery maker Siemens AG says it will cut 7,800 administrative jobs worldwide as part of an effort to streamline the sprawling company and its many businesses.
Munich-based Siemens said in a statement Friday that 3,300 of the job losses will be in Germany.
Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser said the cuts were part of an ongoing restructuring whose aim was to “get the company back on a sustainable growth path and close the profitability gap to our competitors. Our strategic reorientation has enabled us to considerably streamline our organization and remove entire intermediate levels.”
Kaeser added that today’s announcement will complete the restructuring of Siemens in line with the new organizational setup of October 1, 2014.
In May 2014, Siemens presented its Vision 2020 concept, with plans to focus activities on the growth fields of electrification, automation and digitalization as well as to considerably streamline its portfolio. Under Vision 2020, the company expects the organization structure to become flatter and more customer-oriented.
Siemens has already implemented the elimination of the company’s sector level as of October 1, 2014, and reduced the number of company divisions from 16 to nine, plus the separately managed Healthcare business.
Siemens said the cuts would save 1 billion euros ($1.14 billion) this year alone that the company could put into growth initiatives such as research and development. As a result, it said overall head count would remain roughly the same.
Siemens had 341,000 employees at year-end in more than 200 countries.
Tagged with tED