French Bank Société Générale announces job cuts after profit slump

French bank Societe Generale is to shed more than a thousand jobs worldwide, after reporting on Tuesday that first-quarter net profit fell by half to 364 million euros.

Reuters/Benoit Tessier

General manager Jean-François Sammarcelli said the job losses would save 900 million euros by 2015.

When asked on French station BFM Radio if the bank expected to shed more than 1,000 jobs, Sammarcelli replied that the figure would be substantially higher.

He said that the cuts would include the loss of about 550 jobs at the bank's headquarters in Paris.

The bank employs about 154,000 people throughout the world including 60,000 in France.

The price of shares in the banking group rose by 4.0 percent in initial trading, with analysts welcoming the cost-cutting strategy.

In the first three months of the year, net profit fell by half, from the equivalent figure last year, owing to exceptional cost factors totalling 488 million euros.

The bank said in a statement that it had decided to apply a programme to improve efficiency with three objectives: "Reduce costs and strengthen competitiveness, simplify the way the group functions and to strengthen synergy between the resources used by the different activities of the bank."

The programme would involve restructuring and investment costs of 600 million euros.