Hundreds of workers to lose their jobs…

Hundreds of Vodafone UK employees are set to hear that they will lose their jobs tomorrow as the company continues to attempt to cut costs to remain stable throughout the recession.

Vodafone UK will be making the announcement tomorrow which should save the company outgoings amounting to a hefty billion pounds over the coming 14 months.

The move comes almost a year after Vodafone UK cut 450 jobs from its headquarters in Newbury, although those positions were replaced with salespeople located around the country.

However, the move to cut jobs at the Newbury headquarters was considered a relatively small step as the losses only amounted to around 10 per cent of the complete staff and an even less significant amount of the total 10,000 employees under the Vodafone umbrella in the United Kingdom.

Tough times cause the concern…

The news hasn’t come as a shock to many people as Vodafone UK themselves had previously predicted a tough 2008 period which wouldn’t show good figures.

Vodafone’s boss, Vittorio Colao, has also mentioned in recent times that the plan for Vodafone is not to focus on gaining new customers but instead focus on how to get as much money as possible out of existing customers with the provider.

Therefore, cutting costs and therefore jobs is an expected move by the company who are looking to boost their figures.

“Some impact on headcount”…

The first inkling that the billion pound cost cutting attempts would affect employees was when Colao mentioned that the cuts would have “some impact on headcount” although he has declined to release information about how many jobs that would entail.

Vodafone are remaining extremely tight-lipped on the whole situation and have refused to comment on what it classes to be “rumour and speculation”.

At present the company runs on operating costs adding up to around £22 billion so a one billion cut in these costs would surely be welcomed by Vodafone.

Everyone’s doing it these days!

Of course Vodafone UK are not the only telecoms providers in the United Kingdom who are resorting to job cuts to weather the economic storm as Virgin Media, BT and Cable and Wireless have all made redundancies.

It would seem that, like us, the unions are also being made to wait until tomorrow to hear the extent of the damage of the job cuts, as a spokesman for Connect, the union that represents employees in the communications industry, underlined the necessity for the provider to work with the union.

“We are awaiting a formal announcement from the company but it does look likely that there will be a significant number of redundancies in the UK.

“We will be urging the company to work with us to explore options around re-training and redeployment,” said the spokesman.

Revenue up, employee numbers down…

Vodafone UK has 19.1 million customers around Britain and for the last three months of 2008 up until December 31 the provider enjoyed revenues of £10.47 billion which was a rise of 14.3 per cent due to the issues with exchange rates around the globe.