Shell Chief Expected to Cut More Senior Jobs

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Royal Dutch Shell is poised to announce a fresh wave of cuts in senior jobs this week as Peter Voser, the new chief executive, intensifies an aggressive restructuring drive within the Anglo-Dutch oil company, the Times Online reported.

Shell is expected to reveal today—alongside its interim results—that up to a quarter of its senior management, between 500 and 600 people globally, will lose their jobs in the coming weeks. The cuts represent the climax of a huge shakeup underway at Shell, which Voser took full control of from Jeroen van der Veer this month, the report stated.

Voser, who stepped up from his previous role as chief financial officer, already trimmed the number of executive directors who sit on the company’s board from five to three, which led to the departure of Linda Cook, Shell’s chief of gas and power and its most senior female executive. Voser also eliminated roughly a quarter of the 80 or so top-level management positions immediately below Shell’s executive committee.

The next round of departures, to be outlined this week, will involve the layer of managerial positions below this, according to the Times Online.

The largest number of cuts is expected to be in The Hague, where 2,000 people work at Shell’s global headquarters—particularly from Cook’s former gas and power division, one of the company’s three former upstream businesses that are being folded into two new regional units: Upstream Americas and Upstream International. Further cuts are expected, including in the U.K. where Shell employs 8,500 people and where its global downstream and marketing division is based in London, the report stated.

The global program of de-layering in Shell is aimed at streamlining the company into a less bureaucratic organization along the lines of ExxonMobil, the U.S. market leader. The aim is to complete the overhaul by the end of the year, the newspaper reported.

Analysts expect about 10,000 of Shell’s global workforce of 102,000 to be cut under the restructuring, which was launched May 27, at a meeting of the company’s senior executives in Berlin. Many were told then that they would have to reapply for their jobs.

Shell, which reported profits of more than $26 billion last year, is expected to reveal lackluster second-quarter earnings today on the back of a lower oil price than during the same period a year ago, according to the Times Online report.

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