Brazil’s state oil firm Petrobras saw a late rush of take-ups on its offer of voluntary layoffs to staff, with more than 5,000 extra workers signing up to the deal in the final week before its deadline, according to Bloomberg.
That brought the total of participants in the redundancy scheme to 11,704. That will represent a huge amount of savings in years to come as the scandal-plagued company tries to repair a bottom line that has been badly dented by the company’s massive corruption scandal and by the low price of oil.
In the short term Petrobras takes the hit of thousands of layoff payouts but that will be more than offset by the estimated $10bn saved in labour costs.
It’s all part of drastic measures the company – the most indebted oil business in the world – has been taking the past year, including hacking budgets and slashing investments.
