France Télécom will shed 13,000 jobs, including 7,500 in France, this year, the company's chairman Mr Thierry Breton confirmed yesterday.
The former State-owned telecommunications giant is struggling under a €70 billion debt, and shareholders are complaining in advance of the February 25th general assembly.
The value of France Télécom shares has fallen 29 per cent since the company was floated on the Paris Bourse in October 1997; 90 per cent since March 2000.
Mr Breton said the directors had approved the cutbacks. "But no one will be fired. In France, we are counting on 4,100 early retirements, 3,400 departures through natural attrition and a few hundred civil servants going back to the civil service," he said. The company will freeze hiring.
Mr Breton was appointed last October to turn the ailing company around. He resolved the liquidity problem by issuing bonds and refinancing the company's debt.
France Télécom employs 233,000 people worldwide, and a restructuring plan presented in December said this would be reduced to 220,000 this year.
The Polish operator TPSA will be hard hit, with more than 4,000 jobs lost. Loss-making foreign subsidiaries will be shut down, including the Swedish and Swiss operations of France Télécom's mobile telephone subsidiary Orange.
The Orange and Wanadoo (internet) subsidiaries may be brought back into the mother company.
The French trade union Force Ouvrière Communication denounced "severe cuts" at France Télécom, adding that it expects internal restructuring, transfers of personnel and the dismantling of subsidiaries.
