Fujitsu cuts 1,200 UK jobs after revenue mauling
Fujitsu Services is shedding roughly 10 per cent of its UK workforce with the announcement that 1,200 jobs will go, following less than pretty revenues. In June the Japanese tech firm reported an 11 per cent drop in first quarter revenue, down to ¥1.04tn (£6.7bn). It pulled in a net loss of ¥29bn (£186m) during Q1. However, …
what a way to start the bank holiday weekend...
And with a 90 consultation period, that rolls us right up to Xmas.
And after record profits in 2008/2009, no bonus 2008, no pay review 2009, closure of final salary pension, increased processes -making engineers fill more paper work in rather than producing efficient systems and services. Hmmmm makes sense doesn't it!!!
Perhaps the company will just be running on managers in the future.
no job.
The lack of bonus and the pay freeze were cited as better than the alternative. Now we have all three! I feel so motivated!
"Fujitsu UK currently has "excess capability in a number of areas of the business""
They are right though, amongst the people they employ there are many who have a great excess of capability, a pity their management's only capability is in meaningless corporate jargon.
As always though, management incompetence negatively impacts those who actually do something useful for a living.
If one tech specialist or field service engineer costs about £40,000 a year (£25k salary plus costs to the company*) and one area manager costs about £250,000 (£150k salary plus costs*) then why do they keep cutting the people who provide the most service to the paying customers?
Much greater savings can be made by sacking one worthless bureaucrat while still keeping customer satisfaction at a reasonable level, rather than getting rid of the people who do the real work and keeping the bloated Executive structure - that £250k doesn't include the cost of his PA and the extra work he generated for the local support staff.
And don't get me started on how much the "top-level" EMEA management cost... but one of the higher-level managers was on a £400k+ salary package... and he wasn't even the gentleman they sent over from States-side to oversee things!
*based on how a certain AmeriCan outSourCer paid before they "downsized" me as part of a cost-cutting drive... Bitter and twisted, me? Never!
Considering the 8000+ engineers and other assorted staff that transferred when FJS bought out Siemens half of the company.
As long as your service desk makes a profit, you should be fine.
Grenade, well, I'm as annoyed as the next man.
I can' believe anyone still works for these jokers, they have been screwing the staff over and over since they took over ICL!
No doubt a bullshit "consultation" sham, to be followed immediately by all the pre-planned redundancies to those "specific" areas they can outsource directly to India - for "competitiveness'" sake, of course.
My heartfelt sympathies to those facing the axe for no other reason than corporate greed - I was in the same boat around this time last year.
Aren't we supposed to have a Labour Govt in power? Then why the fuck are they allowing every company in the UK to shed its UK workers and getting Indians to do it?
I see 3.3 million households have nobody working in them, at this rate it will be every house in the country. Thanks Labour.
Following on from Roger Gilbert’s announcement, it is clear we have a cost base challenge within the company. Unfortunately this challenge is present within Data Centres & Networks and so it is with regret that I confirm that we will be placing people in four specific teams ‘at risk’ of redundancy:
q DSL Team
q Capacity Team
q Man23 Ops
q Solihull NOC
Those impacted will receive more details over the next 48 hours.
Clearly this will have been distressing news to those in the teams and also the wider organisation so may I ask you to be supportive to all your colleagues during this difficult time for all concerned and it is the sole direct result of the business climate in which we find ourselves
Personally I am less than impressed with the fujitsu methods.
Some of us are working our asses and are being penalised for doing so!
Fujitsu are going to loose some really talented MOSS 2007 guys (with accessibility skills) and a lot of experience....
And how exactly would you expect any government to do that.
And with the Tories coming in in the next 12 months you can look forward to even more jobs shifting off shore as the government desperately tries to cut its IT costs, by buying on price alone.
Still Fuji are still so unpopular in government that even if the off shore everything and charge 1p they still won't win much.
I feel very sorry for the excellant technical staff from them I've worked with, compared to their management.
Does every company in the UK use the same phrase?
"necessary to ensure that the company remains competitive in the current difficult global economic climate"
Are they all licensing that line from the same source, or does each company get to borrow it for the day?
"Then why the fuck are they allowing every company in the UK to shed its UK workers and getting Indians to do it?"
Well, firstly Fujitsu is a global company with the head office in Japan so probably don't really care about non-Japanese workers that much and if the government said to any global company that they had to do all of their work in the UK if they have a UK base we'd probably find that global companies would just stay away from the UK altogether. How would that help the economy?
Secondly, there's no suggestion in the article that the jobs are moving to India, this is more likely as a result of having insufficient business to go with staffing levels.
When Woolies shed all of their staff at the beginning of the year it wasn't because they moved the work to India.
Do grow up.
Considering that in Fuji there are over 4000 people with the word manager in their title, surely the cuts should fall there? Although I bet Roger Gilbert's salary won't take a hit.
"the government desperately tries to cut its IT costs"
Yes, but the Tories still have the New Labour sleaze campaign after effect (which made the whole expenses row doubly funny) so they'll put an effort in to be as clean as possible while New Labour will wallow in the problem they created for some more years. Payback is a b*tch..
If you strip a contract from its shenanigans you may *almost* end up with IT that is actually designed to WORK rather than to keep the supplier in support and "change control" profit for as long as they get away with. Add to that that it will be much harder to join the respective supplier later as a "government consultant" (translated: reward for rigging procurement) and this may prove cost saving enough of its own to keep things local.
In addition, quite a bit will be saved as soon as they ditch ID Cards. That should be OK now, the consulting partner who made his money there (by having somewhat of a creative view on the corporate ethics policy) has retired so there's no need to prolong the wastage.
So there, all may be well..
I'm grown up, and here's a question I would like you to answer after thinking carefully; if a (global or not) company wishes to sell products or services to people in the UK - and makes a profit out of doing so - why should all that profit then go overseas? If the workers are all based in, for example, India then all the workers spend their money in India, all the taxes go to the Indian governement and the British economy ends up losing the whole value of the goods or services provided.
Sure, a single PC or printer doesn't cost very much by itself, but if every PC, every printer, all the consumables and any upgrades or replacements are added together, you soon end up with a hell of a lot of money going overseas, and none of it coming back any time soon.
As for insufficient business for the number of staff, how come one of the first things a company does after taking over another is shed staff? Unless both companies were overstaffed to begin with, you now have two companies' workloads and fewer staff to do it. And isn't it strange how Management types always seem to be able to find a new niche in the restructuring but the 'customer-facing' workers - the ones who keep customers "happy" and the business in, well, business, are the first to get the chop?
Part of the reason Woolies "failed" is that they had to pay people like EMI and Sony for the DVDs and CDs bought by their Entertainment UK (EUK) business, but the companies they supplied (like Zavvi) were late paying EUK, so Woolies had to fund EUK and went under - paying for someone else's non-payment. If you had watched the news or actually gone into your nearest branches of Woolies, you would have seen that the bricks-and-mortar stores were doing quite good business - remarkably good in fact, considering the general state of the UK economy.
It's amazing that the Labour government can "find" billions of £'s of taxpayers money to bail out the greedy bastards who caused most of this mess, but couldn't help a major GB employer.
Oh, and one more thing - those banks that "we" so willingly helped? Shedding more UK staff and "offshoring" jobs again. Wanna guess where those jobs will end up? Hwere's a clue - it won't be the UK...
"Still Fuji are still so unpopular in government that even if the off shore everything and charge 1p they still won't win much."
Not to be argumentative but trying to keep bureaucratic redtape-mongers happy is nigh on impossible, even perfect service and meeting SLA easily brings the odd whinge and moan :P
The only surprise is that anyone believed management when they told us that the pay freeze was the only hit that we would have to take to ensure the safety of the company. It matters not that EMEA is turning a profit - it's a drop in the bucket of the overall losses and above all we are the outpost so we're the first to be abandoned to preserve the home company.
Good luck everyone. We're going to need it.
Seriously guys, are there any large IT services companies which are good employers. IT companies own nothing, make nothing and only exist to serve their "customers" and make money for the "executives" and shareholders. No customers - no profits - no reason to exist. There is no room for loyalty to good employees, the good, the bad and the ugly alike get the chop. We are in a "Economic Downturn" and these companies are showing their true colours. If you are getting the boot I hope that you can find alternative employment quickly.
I notice that the bbc reports showed footage of the wrong company They filmed Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe Limited, rather than the Fujitsu Services Ltd who this announcement is about. I feel for you guys though, I've been through multiple versions of the same thing for another tech company.
I'm glad I left last year - the sheer incompetence of the various management levels was funny at first but slowly got beyond a joke. And don't get me started on the pay, or RISE+ schemes
Good luck to all those still there - hope you land ok.
The mail from Roger Gilbert says revenues are down 7%. No mention of profit or margins. Who wants to bet they aren't down by the same amount?
If you're at Fujitsu and aren't a UNITE or PCS member, I'd suggest you join.
Just after 2001, when ICL died, we were offered voluntary redundancies before forced...three times as many people asked to be made redundant, knowing that Fuji would be a bad employer...also 3 pay reviews were skipped and the next award held off for 6 months...I went to SERCO, not a brilliant employer (no benefits in the package) but at least more honest. Looks like history on the repeat at Fujitsu tho
This is not the first batch of redundancies for this year by any means. Not that you would have known it from this article, posted on the 27th March 2009 and titled "Fujitsu staff clash with bosses over pay freeze" :
"We asked the Fujitsu spokesman if jobs could be under threat at the company."
Spokesman's response: 'We have no intention of doing that, but equally we can't say there won't be job cuts in the future,"
Except the spokesman in question must have or at least should have known this was completely untrue because Fujitsu were already in the process of closing down their site at Foots Cray and had called all the employees there to a briefing on the 4th March to be told the bad news. Plus there had been a jobs fair held on the 19th and 20th March with Jobcentre Plus amongst others in attendance.
Atlhough some people did manage to get alternative jobs within Fujitsu a fair number still ended up getting made redundant.
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