Telstra has announced plans to cut 1100 of its 30,000-strong workforce, with the company’s operations division bearing the brunt of the job losses.
The cuts amount to 6% of the company’s operations staff, including fixed line field technicians in New South Wales, Victoria, ACT and Tasmania, along with the company’s media operations team and its customer service team.
“I think [Telstra chief executive] David [Thodey] is on record as saying we need to continue to change the shape of Telstra, and it’s probably going to get smaller every year,” Telstra’s chief operations officer Brendon Riley says.
Department store chain David Jones has announced a 5.9% drop in its annual profit to $95.2 million last financial year.
The figures show costs were up $11.8 million, while revenues dropped by 1.2% to $1.8 billion, with the retailer putting a brave face on the drop.
“We rolled-out new technology through our business; including a new point of sale system with stock search capability, traffic analytics and ‘daily sales & productivity’ reports for frontline staff members,” David Jones chief executive Paul Zahra says in a statement.
Canadian investment tycoon Prem Watsa says he’s confident his consortium’s $US4.7 billion bid for embattled smartphone giant BlackBerry will go ahead.
“We wouldn’t put our name to such a high-profile deal if we didn’t feel confident that at the end of the day our due diligence would be fine and we’d be able to finance it,” Watsa says.
“BlackBerry is one of Canada’s great success stories. There is no question it’s fallen on hard times recently, but we have every confidence it will be successful again. We’re putting a consortium together to make sure that that takes place.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down .4% to 15273.26. The Aussie dollar is down to US93.62 cents.
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
