HSBC is cutting up to 50,000 jobs in major global restructuring

(Image credit: Harold Cunningham/Getty Images)

published 9 June 2015

On Tuesday, British banking giant HSBC said it will cut up to 50,000 jobs, or almost a fifth of its workforce, in a major restructuring that will further shift Europe's largest bank toward the Asian market. Roughly half of the cuts will come from HSBC selling its operations in Turkey and most of its Brazilian assets, and the other half — 22,000 to 25,000 — will come from closing branches and consolidating IT and back-office personnel. At the end of 2014, HSBC had 258,000 full-time employees.

The disclosure to Hong Kong's stock exchange is the latest bid by CEO Stuart Gulliver to make the massive bank more manageable and profitable, seeking to cut costs by $4.5 billion to $5 billion a year by 2017. The plan also includes shrinking HSBC's risk-weighted assets and downsize its investment bank. Some investors had called for steeper cuts. "Slaughtering the staff is not necessarily the solution unless management makes the bank considerably less complex," James Antos, an analyst at Mizuho Securities Asia, tells Reuters.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.