Engineering news
EADS has been participating in building the Eurofighter Typhoon
Defence and aerospace giant EADS is to slash almost 6,000 jobs across Europe as it looks to reduce costs.
The job losses are likely to impact its Stevenage, Portsmouth and Newport facilities, as EADS looks to “consolidate activities” at the three sites. Functions at smaller business units will also be relocated to one of the three sites.
The cutbacks come as EADS tries to improve competitiveness within its defence and space divisions. A decision was taken by EADS's board of directors in July this year to consolidate the defence and space businesses into one new division and to rebrand EADS as “Airbus Group”.
Tom Enders, chief executive of EADS, said: “We need to improve our competitiveness in defence and space – and we need to do it now.
“With our traditional markets down, we urgently need to improve access to international customers, to growth markets. For that to work, we need to cut costs, eliminate product and resource overlaps, create synergies in our operations and product portfolio and better focus our research and development efforts. That’s what the restructuring and integration plan for our defence and space business is all about.”
Tom Enders at EADS
Overall, EADS plans to cut 5,800 positions by the end of 2016. Up to 1,500 positions will be offered redeployment at Airbus and Eurocopter. After non-renewal of temporary contracts – around 1,300 jobs – and the application of additional voluntary measures, final redundancies are estimated in the range of 1,000 – 1,450 employees, subject to the achievement of voluntary measures, it said.
As part of the overall headcount reduction, corporate functions and services will be reduced by around 500 positions.