Photo: Afghan National Police
French manufacturer of trains, metro and rail systems, Alstom, will cut about 1,500 jobs. This intervention comes within the framework of a larger reorganization process that will improve the financial position of the industrial group, as the company announced in its semi-annual results.
To reduce costs, Alstom mainly wants to reduce the number of employees with administrative or commercial functions. Nearly one in ten jobs in those departments will disappear. Technical personnel or factory workers are not affected by the reorganization.
It is not immediately clear what the intervention means for the Dutch divisions of Alstom, which, among other things, supplied the NS with trains. A company spokeswoman said that more details about the reorganization will be announced at a later date. Nearly four hundred employees work at eleven sites in the Netherlands, who provide, among other things, maintenance services and supply signaling systems.
The biggest concern for Alstom is the high debt load coupled with negative cash flow in the first half of the year. Therefore, debt must be reduced by 2 billion euros. In addition to saving staff costs, Alstom wants to achieve this by selling assets worth between 500 million and 1 billion euros.
The problems at Alstom largely arise from the acquisition of Canada’s Bombardier’s train division in 2021 for about 5.3 billion euros. A lot of money is being lost due to delays in the delivery of Bombardier Aventra trains in the UK.
