Shell to Cut Up to 9,000 Jobs as Virus Accelerates Overhaul

(Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc will cut as many as 9,000 jobs as Covid-19 accelerates a companywide restructuring into low-carbon energy.

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A Royal Dutch Shell Plc representative wears a shirt with the company’s logo at an oil rig site near Mentone, Texas, U.S., on Thursday, March 2, 2017. Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron Corp., are jumping into American shale with gusto, planning to spend a combined $10 billion this year, up from next to nothing only a few years ago.

The move reflects the challenge facing Big Oil as the pandemic persists, with some in the industry believing the era of demand growth is already over. As the crisis hastens the shift to cleaner energy, oil majors are axing jobs, taking multibillion-dollar writedowns and even slashing once-sacrosanct dividends.

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At Shell, job reductions of 7,000 to 9,000 are expected by the end of 2022, including around 1,500 people taking voluntary redundancy this year, the company said Wednesday. It currently has about 83,000 employees. Sustainable annual cost savings of $2 billion to $2.5 billion are predicted by that time.

“We have to be a simpler, more streamlined, more competitive organization,” Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden said in a statement. “In many places, we have too many layers in the company: too many levels between me, as the CEO, and the operators and technicians at our locations.”

Shell also warned of lower sales in the third quarter, saying oil-product volumes were around 4 million to 5 million barrels a day, down from 6.7 million a day a year earlier. Oil-product trading results will fall short of the historical average and will be “significantly lower” than in the second quarter.

That shows the oil-trading bonanza that saved Shell’s last set of results won’t be repeated. The company also expects refining margins to be much lower than in the second quarter. Its full third-quarter financials, scheduled for Oct. 29, will include impairment charges of $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

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Shell’s B shares slipped 0.7% to 950.2 pence as of 8:04 a.m. in London.

Oil’s coronavirus-induced plunge has seen Shell’s peers also take drastic steps to shore up the balance sheet. BP Plc said in June it planned to cut 10,000 jobs, Chevron Corp. intends to trim 10% to 15% of its global workforce, while Exxon Mobil Corp. is reviewing staffing country by country.

Shell began the process in May, when Van Beurden told staff in a memo that it was reshaping the company to make it leaner and more resilient and that there could be redundancies in the second half of the year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The Anglo-Dutch major offered voluntary severance, scaled back recruitment and reviewed expatriate staff contracts.

The reorganization is also designed to further Shell’s expanded green ambitions. The company said in April it planned to eliminate all net emissions from its own operations and the bulk of greenhouse gases from fuel it sells to its customers by 2050. Shell also said that ultimately, it would only do business with emission-free companies.

(Updates with trading in fifth paragraph.)

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