15,000 more jobs go at BT

Davey Winder
Saturday, 16 May 2009 02:05

IT Industry - Market

The worst is still not over for the telecoms industry as BT announces another round of swathing job cuts.

Just when you thought things could not get any worse, BT announces that it will be getting rid of another 15,000 jobs.

Or to put it another way, that's some ten percent of the total workforce and comes after a year during which it has already axed 15,000 jobs.

BT Chief Executive, Ian Livingston, told The Times that "We will do our best to avoid compulsory redundancies. We are being very inventive about using outsourcing agencies in placing people — and we are also working very hard to retrain and redeploy them."

We understand that over the course of the coming year there will be around 5000 permanent jobs axed and the remaining 10,000 will be cut from agency and contract staff.

All this comes on the back of a worse than expected pre-tax loss of £134 million for the last financial year. And that is just a tad down on the previous year during which BT had pre-tax profits of some £1.9 billion.

The bad guy in all this appears to be the BT Global Services division, responsible for managed network and IT infrastructure services to the larger organisations in both private and public sectors, which showed losses of £2 billion.

"Big global contracts underperformed: BT [Global Services] underestimated the costs associated with large service infrastructures..." Ovum principal analyst, David Maloney, told Computing.

The phrase that comes to mind is 'No Sh*t Sherlock.'