BT Group said it plans to cut its labor force, including employees and contractors, by as much as 42 per cent by the end of the decade after the UK’s biggest network operator completes its nationwide fiber-optic rollout.
The company’s workforce will drop to 75,000 to 90,000 people by the fiscal year ending in March 2030 from about 130,000 currently, the company said in its full-year earnings statement on Thursday.
Chief executive Philip Jansen is slashing costs at BT, fighting an industrywide slump as telecom carriers spend heavily on their networks. He’s pledged to cut expenses by £3 billion (€3.45 billion) a year by 2025 from its base in 2020 and has been weighing more dramatic job cuts since at least 2019.
But he’ll have to wait for the company to finish its fiber-optic rollout, a project to replace much of BT’s slower, copper-based network with higher-speed connections to reach 25 million homes by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, the company said its free cash flow is likely to decline to as low as £1 billion this fiscal year and BT was vague about its earnings for the period, saying they would grow without giving a specific number.
The shares fell 8.7 per cent in London trading after earlier falling as much as 10 per cent, the biggest intraday decline in six months. The company’s stock had gained 32 per cent so far this year through Wednesday.
The company had 97,148 full-time employees as of the end of March with about a third of those working for its Openreach network division.
BT also posted adjusted fourth quarter earnings of £2.05 billion before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. That compared to the £1.99 billion average forecast from analysts in a Bloomberg survey. The company also hit a long-term target for full-year earnings of £7.9 billion that Jansen had originally set out in 2020. -- Bloomberg
