Adel Al-Saleh, an American who became CEO in January, announced the cuts at the start of a two-year strategy to turn the loss-making unit around. Overall it will lose 10,000 of its 37,000 global staff.
The German business newspaper Handelsblatt reported the information yesterday and the Reuters news agency added details. Reuters said that Al-Saleh wants to move T-Systems away from classic IT outsourcing and into digital and cloud services.
T-Systems will recruit only in Hungary, Slovakia and India, said Reuters. Staff numbers in India will increase from 400 to 3,000. The company will close 90% of its 230 German offices.
T-Systems’ global headcount will fall from 37,000 to 27,000, said Al-Saleh, who was CEO of Northgate Information Solutions, which specialises in IT for human resources, before joining the German company.
Handelsblatt quoted Thomas Schneegans, chairman of the central works council and member of the supervisory board of T-Systems: “We have agreed that a total of 3,765 jobs will be lost [in Germany] by the end of 2020. If T-Systems does not fare better by then, another 1,200 jobs could be cut in 2021.” In addition, “several hundred” German staff will leave T-Systems this year.
T-Systems may say it wants to move to cloud, but when Capacity clicked on the “cloud” link on the company’s home page yesterday we got a link saying: “404 – Page not found – The resource you were looking for does not exist.”
