Siemens Fires 7,800 Workers

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Feb 6, 6:19AM EST · Published Feb 6, 4:35AM EST

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Things are not going well at one of the world’s largest conglomerates. Germany’s Siemens will fire 7,800 people in a “restructuring.”

The company’s management announced:

As previously announced, Siemens has informed the relevant employee representatives about the personnel adjustments planned in connection with the company’s new organizational structure. In a drive to streamline administrative and overhead functions, about 7,800 jobs are to be cut worldwide – including some 3,300 in Germany. “Our Vision 2020 concept will enable us to get our company back on a sustainable growth path and close the profitability gap to our competitors. Our strategic reorientation has enabled us to considerably streamline our organization and remove entire intermediate levels. These steps will bring our businesses closer to our customers and make us significantly faster. As a result, certain tasks and functions will be completely eliminated. We’re going to tackle this challenge together and implement the resulting measures responsibly. This completes the restructuring of our company in line with the new organizational setup of October 1, 2014,” said Joe Kaeser, President and CEO of Siemens AG.

The people being fired won’t view the plan is part of a “vision”:

Plans call for cutting about 3,300 jobs in Germany. “We now want to begin talks with the relevant employee representatives as soon as possible and search constructively for socially responsible solutions,” said Janina Kugel, member of the managing board and Labor Director. “We’ve made an agreement with the employee representatives that states that we want to avoid layoffs due to operational requirements. And of course, this agreement still applies,” she added.

The “socially responsible” part of the program will not be any better than the firings either.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.