2024-02-04 18:06:23
A tense week ahead at Société Générale. Three days before the presentation of its annual financial results, the banking group could announce to employees on Monday February 5 its intention to eliminate several hundred positions in its central services and in its IT activities, according to information from the Mondecollected after an article in Echos evoking a threat to 900 positions. Information that a spokesperson for the group neither confirmed nor denied.
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For their part, the unions regret the “you were” in the press and “rumors” which they oppose to the lack of direct information from employees at this stage. Especially since, as the CGT noted in a press release on February 1, “it has been a few weeks since all of the rooms in the historic towers of the Société Générale de La Défense were requisitioned” for February 5. And the extension for one year, concluded on January 15, of an agreement in which management undertook not to carry out any forced departures is far from being enough to reassure the staff concerned.
The group employed a little more than 52,000 people in France in mid-2023 out of a global workforce of 111,700. Although the figure of 900 positions to be eliminated remains to be confirmed, the reduction in the workforce of central and IT services is indeed part of as part of the strategic plan unveiled on September 18, 2023, by the bank’s general director, Slawomir Krupa, in office since May 2023.
“Simplification of the organization”
He had in fact explained that he wanted to make 1.7 billion euros in savings by 2026 compared to the 2022 cost level, including around 600 million in IT services alone, among other things through “improving efficiency” and of “the simplification of the organization”.
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The strategic plan also involves improving risk management, more efficient allocation of equity capital and rationalization of the business portfolio, in order to make Société Générale “a robust and sustainable leading European bank”.
But his presentation to an audience of analysts in London was accompanied by objectives deemed disappointing by the markets, which resulted in a spectacular fall of 12% in one session in the Societe Generale share price at Paris stock exchange.
Brutal market sanctions
The stock has still not recovered from this brutal sanction and the group’s valuation remains below 19 billion euros, compared to 40 billion euros and 64 billion euros respectively for Crédit Agricole and BNP Paribas, the other two major listed French banks. A handicap which, in the eyes of employees, increases the pressure on the management team in favor of major restructuring.
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