Auto-mobile giants General Motors is going to slash its operations in Singapore by 70%, as part of its global initiative aimed at saving 100 USD a year.
There are about 180 staff members at General Motors International at OUE Bayfront in Collyer Quay. According to inside reports about 70% of the staff will be laid off. They will leave in two batches. The first batch by end of this month and the second in December.
As severance, the company is paying one month for each year of service, in addition to that an ex-gratia payment for another month. Employees of the company throughout the nation are affected, including director of sales and business development Cheong Chee Sing and president Stefan Jacoby.
Mr Cheong said he has been thinking about taking a break "for some time", "so this is timely".
"I'll take a break before planning my next phase in life," the GM veteran of 22 years said. "There's no hurry to find another job."
Mr Jacoby, whose job is expected to be downsized, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
In a statement he said: "with an enterprise approach and making decisions that are best for the global business". The Singapore restructuring comes just three years after GM re-opened its regional headquarters here.
The GM relocated to Shanghai in 2004, after the Economic Development Board awarded the company an operational HQ status.
After the 2008 global financial crisis, it even closed its distribution and logistics center which it had operated here since 1972.
About 100 jobs were affected back then in Singapore. In 2014, Mr Jacoby said: "The main difference is that we will have a much better grip of our markets... and we will raise the level of localization."
The latest slashing is company’s global efforts to establish the Gm as a more focused and disciplined company.
Earlier this month, the company announced that it will stop selling Chevrolet cars in India, South Africa and East Africa. The company is planning to sell its businesses its dealership and plant to Isuzu.
GM expects to have an annual savings of about USD 100 million and plans to take a charge of about USD 500 million in the second quarter of this year.
The charge will be treated as special and excluded from the company's results adjusted for Ebit (earnings before interest and tax).
In the last quarter of last year, GM said it planned to cut more than 3,000 jobs.
The Ford Motor was set to cut about 10% jobs, approximately 20,000 jobs from its global operations as a plan to save USD 3 billion in costs this year, according to Asian Wall Street Journal.
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