Etisalat to cut jobs

Etisalat is planning to cut around 300 jobs, or about three per cent of its workforce to reduce costs, reports local newspaper, The National. The company’s staff bill has risen by 4.9 per cent over the past nine months.

Faiez Awadh, Etisalat’s senior vice president of human resources said that the cuts would be “focused on productivity, performance, age and redundancy factors”.

“Etisalat has embarked on a limited employee retrenchment programme, which has impacted less than three per cent of staff. Naturally, within a corporation that has been in existence for more than three decades, we can expect an element of natural re-organisation to occur,” he told the newspaper.

The job cuts will be focused on Etisalat’s UAE operations, although the operator plans to continue to hire staff for its international operations. The company has a workforce of 10,460 in the UAE, with a further 6,220 at its overseas subsidiaries.