HSBC axes nearly 5,000 jobs in bid to reduce salary costs after sacking CEO
HSBC will make as many as 4,700 people redundant from its global workforce in a bid to cut long-term costs, it has announced this morning.
The job cuts will involve as many as two per cent of its workers across the world, who number 237,685.
Read more: Goodbye, John Flint: Why has HSBC axed its CEO?
HSBC hopes to reduce its global salary cost by four per cent.
The move will likely hit senior staff hardest, and bring restructuring costs for the full year up to $700m (£576m).
Chief financial officer Ewen Stevenson said this morning: “This programme is about four per cent of our overall wage cost for less than two per cent of headcount.
“You can read into that that it is at the more senior levels of the organisation and therefore more strategic in terms of its focus, and I wouldn’t pick out any particular area of the bank.”
The news comes as the bank parts ways with chief executive John Flint, who was only in charge for 18 months.
The firm said this morning it needed a change at the helm to deal with a “challenging global environment”. Flint is stepping down “by mutual agreement”.
Read more: HSBC CEO John Flint steps down from bank after just 18 months
Chairman Mark Tucker is said to have disagreed with former CEO Flint on how fast the bank should have met profit targets.
A spokesperson for the bank declined to comment on whether any of the job cuts would come from HSBC’s UK workforce, of roughly 42,000 people.
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