(Bloomberg) -- UBS Group AG plans to slash about 3,000 jobs in its home market as it seeks to cut billions of dollars in costs after buying rival Credit Suisse.
It would be next to impossible to extract savings from the takeover “without going through people and headcount,” Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti said in a Bloomberg TV interview. In Switzerland, “we will have around 3,000 jobs that will be made redundant over the next years.”
It's the first time Ermotti has put a concrete figure on how many jobs the massive merger will cost, though the forced redundancies in Switzerland are likely only a small part of the total reduction in headcount. The acquisition of Credit Suisse increased UBS's workforce by 45,000 to currently just under 120,000.
The lender previously said it wants to slash staff costs globally by about $6 billion over the next several years, effectively accounting for more than half of Ermotti's promise to slash costs by more than $10 billion.
About 1,000 of the cuts in Switzerland are the result of UBS's decision, announced on Thursday, to keep Credit Suisse's Swiss unit. Fixing other parts of Credit Suisse will result in an additional 2,000 cuts in its home country.
The redundancies will only start from late 2024 or early 2025, Ermotti said at a press conference in Zurich after the publication of quarterly results.
The combined Swiss headcount for UBS and Credit Suisse would have been about 39,000 at the end of last year, according to corporate filings. Ermotti has signaled he expects additional headcount reductions through voluntary departures.
“All of the options we considered came with some painful realities,” he wrote in a memo to employees. “The vast majority of cost reductions will come from natural attrition, retirements and internal mobility.”
Globally, about 8,000 Credit Suisse staff have already left since the beginning of the year, Ermotti said. That was partly the result of cost reductions initiated by Credit Suisse before it got taken over, with UBS since accelerating those measures, he said.
--With assistance from Alessandro Speciale.
(Updates with timeline of job cuts in sixth paragraph.)
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