A BP logo is displayed on a filling station in Huddersfield, Britain, in 2023. On Thursday, the petroleum giant said it will cut 4,700 jobs this year in a cost-cutting measure. That amounts to about 5% of its total workforce.
File Photo by Adam Vaughan/EPA-EFE
Jan. 16 (UPI) — Petroleum giant British Petroleum will cut 4,700 jobs this year in a cost-cutting measure, the company announced Thursday. That amounts to about 5% of its total workforce.
The company made the announcement in a memo to employees Thursday, CNN reported. BP said it had plans to cut as many as 3,000 contractor jobs, 2,600 of which already had been eliminated.
It’s not clear how many jobs will be affected in each country where the corporation has a presence, the BBC reported.
BP employs about 14,000 people in the United States.
The BBC also reported that of the 16,000 BP employees in the U.K., 6,000 of them work in gas and service stations, and they would not lose their jobs. The company said most of the job cuts would come in office-based jobs rather than in operational roles.
BP said the job cuts are part of a multiyear plan to reduce costs.
“We are strengthening our competitiveness and building in resilience as we lower our costs, drive performance improvement and play to our distinctive capabilities,” the company told CNN in an interview.
BP has said that its employee base had grown substantially in recent years, partly because it had acquired companies with large worker bases, and that it intended to streamline its operations soon.
BP CEO Murray Auchincloss set a target to cut costs by $2 billion by the end of next year from the 2023 expenditures level.
“We have got more we need to do through this year, next year and beyond, but we are making strong progress as we position BP to grow as a simpler, more focused, higher-value company,” Auchincloss told the BBC.
He added that BP had stopped or paused 30 projects since June of last year.