Siemens to shed 1,700 staff in Germany

FRANKFURT: Siemens announced plans on Thursday to cut 1,700 jobs in Germany, or around 1.5 percent of the workforce in its home country, and transfer another 1,000 positions as part of an efficiency drive.

It will reshuffle its enterprise IT business, consolidate storage sites at its Digital Factory division, cut jobs at its Mobility business and bundle its training centers, it said in a statement.

Chief Executive Joe Kaeser has been seeking to improve the group’s profitability by selling a number of consumer businesses, stripping out layers of management and making large acquisitions in industrial software and energy.

The group said that over the same period it planned to hire around 9,000 new employees in Germany, but would make efforts to retrain as many of its current employees affected by the shake-up as possible.

Half of the 2,700 current jobs affected by the overhaul will be at Siemens’s enterprise IT unit, where it said it aimed to create capacities for new tasks such as cybersecurity and the expansion of platforms for data analysis.

Transfers will involve moving staff to external service providers in Germany or to other units within Siemens.

“The realignment of our enterprise IT will undoubtedly play a key role for Siemens in its transformation into a digital industrial company,” Michael Sen, management board member, said in the statement.