Paper: Reuters set to cut 1,000 more jobs
( 2003-01-12 08:57 ) (7 )

The world's largest financial information provider, Reuters Group Plc, is set to shed a further 1,000 jobs as part of a new cost-cutting drive, The Sunday Times newspaper said, citing industry sources.

Chief Executive Tom Glocer is expected to announce the plans with the group's full-year results next month, the paper said.

Reuters, which sells real-time financial news and data to bankers, brokers and fund managers world-wide, is suffering along with its customers from the worst bear market in 30 years. It has already shed more than 2,000 jobs, or about 10 percent of its core workforce, since mid 2001.

"2003 is going to be a bad year," The Sunday Times quoted a person close to the firm as saying.

A Reuters spokesman described the report as speculative but declined to confirm or deny it. "We have not made any announcement and we don't intend to make any announcement on our plans until the results," he said.

The newspaper said the cuts would hit the company's finance, administration and software development departments and that the move was likely to lead to a restructuring charge of about 150 million pounds ($241 million) in this year's accounts.

Reuters' technology-focused divisions are to be slimmed down. "The company is not a technology group, and it is going to stop competing head-on with IBM and Accenture," the paper quoted one source as saying.

Reuters shares fell 74 percent in 2002 to become the year's biggest decliner in the FTSE 100 index of London's blue chip stocks. It touched a 12-year-low of 148 pence in October and closed on Friday at 203-3/4p.