Thyssenkrupp to slash 5,000 more jobs as firm steels for more pain
German industrial giant Thyssenkrupp will cut another 5,000 jobs after posting a massive €1.6bn loss in the last financial year.
The latest round of cuts comes on top of 6,000 redundancies announced last year, meaning the conglomerate is axing a tenth of its 104,000-strong workforce in total.
Chief executive Martina Merz warned that the company’s next steps could be even more painful than those it had taken so far.
“We’re not yet where we need to be. The next steps could be more painful than the previous ones. But we will have to take them”, she said in a statement.
Central to the firm’s problems is its steelmaking division, which crashed to a loss of nearly €1bn over the year.
Thyssenkrupp said that a decision would be taken on the next steps for the division in the spring.
Before the Open newsletter: Start your day with the City View podcast and key market data
A number of plans for the division have been drawn up, among which is the possibility that it could be combined with a rival such as Tata Steel or Germany’s Salzgitter.
In October Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Steel also threw its name into the hat for the division.
There have also been reports that the company has been in talks with the German government for €5bn in aid to prop up the steel business.
Thyssenkrupp’s financial woes have continued despite selling its elevator division for €17bn to a group of private equity firms last year.
Merz said that losses would narrow to several hundreds of millions of euros in the next financial year, but it would still be faced with a negative cash flow of around €1.5bn.
Shares in the company, which are trading at a third of the start of the year’s levels, slipped another seven per cent this morning.