BASF to cut 3,700 jobs by 2013

Chemical company BASF said the integration of Switzerland’s Ciba Holding will lead to 3,700 job cuts by 2013 and annual cost …

Chemical company BASF said the integration of Switzerland’s Ciba Holding will lead to 3,700 job cuts by 2013 and annual cost savings of about €400 million.

“The combined businesses can be successful in the long term only if we optimize them and exploit the full potential for synergies,” Juergen Hambrecht, chief executive officer of Ludwigshafen-Germany-based BASF said in a statement today.

The slump in chemical demand coincided with Hambrecht’s decision to buy Ciba for about $3 billion. The integration of the dye-maker will include the revamp, sale or closure of 23 of the 55 former

Ciba sites worldwide. By the end of 2010, BASF aims to achieve savings of about €300 million with merger costs totalling €550 million.

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BASF, which concluded the purchase of Ciba in April, had said it expected synergies of about 10 percent of Ciba’s sales from the purchase and past acquisitions have yielded about 50 per cent of expected savings within the first year.The majority of job cuts take place by the end of 2010, BASF said.

Bloomberg