Aker to lay axe on 500 subsea jobs

Aker Solutions is set to cut 500 permanent positions in its Norwegian subsea business that the company is attributing to the continued slowdown of the market, adding to the nearly 200 job reductions the company announced earlier this year.

Image from Aker.

Aker’s Norwegian workforce was notified today (1 September) that the cuts may be made at the Fornebu, Stokke, Moss and Tranby facilities. The company said adjustments would be made through normal employee turnover, reassignments to other parts of the company and redundancies.

“Activity in the Norwegian offshore services market has declined considerably over the past year as oil companies scale back spending and postpone projects,” said Per Harald Kongelf, head of Aker Solutions’ Norwegian operations. “This has made it necessary to reduce capacity in parts of our business.”

As many as 200 positions in the company’s subsea services business in Ågotnes, Norway, and about 300 positions in its Norwegian maintenance, modifications and operations unit (MMO) were cut in June 2015. Outside of Norway, the company is reducing capacity by about 400 permanent positions this year, primarily in the subsea area.

As of today, Aker Solutions has about 16,000 permanent employees in approximately 20 countries with approximately 8000 employees in the subsea area, of which around 3000 are in Norway. The rest are in countries including Brazil, Angola, Malaysia, the US and the UK.

Aker said it is also initiating a process to strengthen the structure of its global subsea business to streamline its organizational set-up to reduce complexity and boost efficiency, and to enable leaner processes and strengthen overall operations.

Norway accounted for 30% of Aker Solutions’ US$5.3 billion (NOK 44 billion) order backlog at the end of 2Q 2015.

Read more:

More job cuts expected from Aker, FMC

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