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October 8, 2019

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Report claims HSBC planning to lay off 10,000 staff

The London-headquartered HSBC Holdings is planning to lay off up to 10,000 staff, a report said yesterday, just weeks after announcing the resignation of its chief executive and the cutting of 4,000 posts citing a weak global outlook.

The latest losses, mostly in high-paid roles, are part of a fresh cost-cutting drive by interim boss Noel Quinn as the banking titan struggles to adjust to falling interest rates, Brexit and the long-running trade war, the Financial Times reported.

“We’ve known for years that we need to do something about our cost base, the largest component of which is people — now we are finally grasping the nettle,” the paper quoted an unnamed source as saying.

“There’s some very hard modeling going on. We are asking why we have so many people in Europe when we’ve got double-digit returns in parts of Asia.”

The bank last month announced the shock exit of CEO John Flint after just 18 months in the hot seat but gave no reason for the decision. It revealed it would axe 2 percent of its global workforce, or roughly 4,000 mostly management jobs, in a new restructuring aimed at weathering the global turmoil.

According to the bank’s 2019 interim report, the group had over 237,000 full-time employees at the end of June 2019.

In August, HSBC announced a rising profit in the first half of the year, with reported profit before tax up 15.8 percent to US$12.4 billion and reported operating expenses down 2.3 percent. However, it also expressed concerns on the 2020 outlook citing global headwinds. Its reported first-half net profit rose 18.6 percent year on year to US$8.5 billion. It is due to report third-quarter earnings at the end of October.

Flint had replaced Stuart Gulliver, who had pushed a massive restructuring program to axe 50,000 jobs and exit core markets.




 

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