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Perpetual has confirmed it has cut between 150 and 200 jobs from its business over the past 12 months.
The job losses include both redundancies and natural attrition over the 2008 calendar year.
Over the past year the group has undertaken a significant business review and restructuring program.
Perpetual will book restructuring charges of $12 million in its December 2008 half year result, an increase on the company’s initial estimate of $10 million. A statement from Perpetual said the “major component” of the charges related to “targeted redundancies across the company in the last quarter of the 2008 calendar year”.
The job losses are believed to have been felt right across the organisation, with each business unit looking at efficiencies. The only area to have been targeted was the corporate trust area, with the group acquiring and merging businesses in that area.
The restructuring program has resulted in a reduction in cash expenses by around $38 million, or 14 per cent, the group said.
Last Tuesday the group alerted the market to significant one-off items that would be booked in the six months to December 2008. This included significant mark-to-market losses in the Exact Market Cash Fund due to the re-pricing of residential mortgage backed securities, although Perpetual said investors in the fund were not impacted by the losses.
At the Investment and Financial Services Association national conference on the Gold Coast last year Perpetual’s managing director, David Deverall, said the “cyclical nature of markets means that we will inevitably endure periods where our industry will be stress tested”.
