Vodafone to cut 11,000 jobs worldwide over next three years

Vodafone is to cut 11,000 jobs from its global workforce over the next three years, the largest round of cuts in the troubled telecoms group’s history.

The job lossesamount to more than a tenth of the 104,000 global staff employed by Vodafone. The company employs about 9,000 people in the UK, including at its headquarters in Berkshire.

The cuts mark the first big move by Margherita Della Valle, appointed as Vodafone’s first female chief executive last month, who said that the company needed to be leaner and more efficient to compete against rivals.

“Our performance has not been good enough. To consistently deliver, Vodafone must change,” she said.

The job losses will fall across Vodafone’s entire operations – starting with its group functions which are based in the UK, Germany, the company’s biggest and worst-performing market, and Italy – with no indication of the scale of cuts in each market.

Della Valle said that Vodafone’s headquarters will become “as lean as possible” and the restructuring plan includes a revision of staff incentive schemes throughout the business to be more closely matched with hitting performance targets.

The cuts will free up an extra €100m (£87m) to be ploughed in to marketing to revitalise the Vodafone brand, and €150m to improve the customer experience.

Della Valle said the savings from the job cuts will not increase a €1bn target announced in November.

The wider restructuring includes a review of options for Vodafone’s Spanish business including a potential sale.

“Looking at our position in the industry and the steps we have taken in the last few years we have probably been too incremental,” Della Valle said.

Vodafone, which has abut 18 million UK mobile customers and more than 1 million broadband customers, is in the closing stages of pushing through a merger with Three to create the UK’s biggest mobile company.

Della Valle said she hoped a deal to reduce the number of big UK mobile operators from four to three – something that has in the past been blocked by regulators over competition issues – will be given the go-ahead.

“I would say that the mood music has changed,” she said. “There is a wide understanding that the problem of returns [on investment] is preventing Europe to develop 5G networks in line with the rest of the world. We don’t have enough scale.”