As part of its campaign to cut expenses by $1,000m within a year, DEC has announced its first ever compulsory job losses by saying that it will be forced to lay off 3,500 people from its current workforce of 123,000 by the the end of its fiscal year, June 30 1991. DEC had hoped to avoid forced job losses by initiating a programme of voluntary redundancies, but by the end of its last fiscal year only 3,200 employees had accepted voluntary packages, while a further 500 workers had trickled out with severance pay in the first quarter 1992. DEC has made no public announcement as to where these job cuts are to come from but said it was likely that most would be axed in the US. A spokesman added that nothing should be inferred from this statement regarding DEC’s second quarter performance. The shares had dropped to $52.25 at lunchtime in the US yesterday. Analysts at SG Warburg and Bear Stearns think that DEC should slash a further 15,000 jobs, saying that the company’s recent acquisition of Mannesmann Kienzle (CI No 1,580) added another 3,900 workers to its payrolls.
