It’s not all sunshine and roses with the world's number one cement producer and parent company of Aggregate Industries. On Friday, Reuters reported:
Chief Executive Jan Jenisch said the cuts, announced by the Franco-Swiss company on Friday, were part of a plan to simplify the company’s structure and improve performance.
“This painful but necessary simplification step is key to creating a leaner, faster and more competitive LafargeHolcim,” he said in a statement.
LafargeHolcim, which employs 80,000 people globally, is at the start of a new strategy under Jenisch following the company’s underperformance in recent years.
Closing the Paris office could spark opposition in France, where the merger of France’s Lafarge with Switzerland’s Holcim in 2015 was promoted as a merger of equals.
A French unionist said that while the announcement came as no surprise following regular staff cuts in recent years, the move laid bare where the balance of power lay in the company.
“This makes it quite clear that it is the Swiss who hold the reins of power,” Sylvain Moreno of the hard-left CGT union told Reuters.
Under the plan, the group will move its operations in Zurich to its site in Holderbank, in Switzerland, where LafargeHolcim’s predecessor company Holcim opened its first cement plant in 1912.
The cuts are part of a 400 million Swiss franc ($403 million) cost-reduction programme announced by the group in March when it said it would close its Singapore and Miami offices by the middle of this year.
LafargeHolcim has lost 27 percent since the merger was completed in 2015, trailing a 32 percent gain by the Stoxx Euro 600 construction & materials index.
Earnings have disappointed and the company has also been embroiled in a scandal after it admitted paying armed groups to keep a cement factory running in war-ravaged Syria.
