German industrial conglomerate ThyssenKrupp said on August 31 that it plans to slash 1,500 jobs in its industrial plant and shipbuilding arm, on top of thousands of cuts announced last month.
"In the coming three years, up to 1,500 further jobs in operational areas will be removed, two-thirds of them in Germany," the group said.
Executives are discussing with worker representatives how to manage the reductions, it added.
Most of the impact will fall on ThyssenKrupp's large industrial plant manufacturing and shipbuilding activities, which it said had suffered from under-utilization and low profitability in recent years as fewer orders rolled in.
"We have to sustainably reduce our costs to remain competitive on the international level," division chief Peter Feldhaus said.
The group added that it had to reorient its production of auto industry plant to a future with more electric cars, and plans to lay out a strategy in the coming months.
Along with other restructuring moves, the latest round of job cuts are expected to create some 200 million euros ($237 million) of savings per year, enabling the division to act "faster, more flexibly and more efficiently," Feldhaus said.
In July, ThyssenKrupp announced some 2,500 job administrative job cuts across all of the group's activities as part of an efficiency drive, 500 of them in the industrial solutions unit.
The division employs some 21,000 people, 13,000 of them in Germany, out of ThyssenKrupp's roughly 150,000 employees worldwide.
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2017
