[SINGAPORE] Companies across sectors, from oil and gas to media and aviation, have continued to cut their headcounts in a bid to cope with challenges such as high costs, tough competition and global trade uncertainty.
Plans by ExxonMobil to slash 500 Singapore jobs are among the latest in a string of layoffs the year has seen, hot on the heels of a recent retrenchment fiasco at Agoda that has put issues of retrenchment ethics and conduct into the limelight.
Here are some of the firms that have recently announced job cuts:
ExxonMobil
The Texan oil company plans to cut up to 500 Singapore jobs by end-2027 as it revamps its local operations. The move, announced on Oct 1, would trim its 3,500-strong Singapore staff force by around 10 to 15 per cent.
The company said on Tuesday that it planned to cut 2,000 jobs across global operations as part of its long-term restructuring plan to consolidate smaller offices into regional hubs.
This followed a Monday announcement that Calgary-based Imperial Oil – in which ExxonMobil holds an almost 70 per cent stake – aims to reduce its headcount by 20 per cent.
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Other major oil companies like Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP have unveiled job cuts in recent months, as crude prices plunged amid higher supply from Opec and its allies.
We. Communications
The public relations firm We. Communications recently retrenched 7 per cent of its Singapore staff for whom the final day of employment was Sep 25.
It laid off workers from a range of departments and positions – from entry level to director roles – were cut. The majority were new joiners with under two years’ service there; one was reportedly hired for under a month.
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The affected staff received severance pay, but the details were not disclosed. In an internal e-mail seen by The Business Times, the company said that business changes over the past year had created budget gaps that necessitated the layoffs. It cited downsized client budgets, rising competition and a transition towards in-house public relations, as reasons for the cuts.
The agency’s long-time client Microsoft cut around 15,000 staff this year. The tech giant announced 9,000 worldwide job cuts in July, without disclosing whether Singapore would be affected.
We. Communications has also temporarily halted salary reviews, bonuses and some employee benefits across all levels until June 2026.
Mediacorp
Mediacorp on Sep 1 announced that it was laying off 93 staff, or slightly over 3 per cent of its workforce.
Without specifying what roles were affected, the broadcaster said the organisation-wide job cuts were part of its efforts to keep pace with the evolving media landscape amid economic and commercial uncertainty.
The affected workers were given until the end of September to find other roles in the company. Those unable to do so would get a severance payment of one month for each year of service, capped at 25 months or S$250,000, depending on experience, salary and seniority.
Dentsu
Dentsu plans to eliminate 3,400 jobs in markets beyond Japan – around 8 per cent of its regional headcount – after recording second-quarter operating losses.
The company said on Aug 14 that the layoffs, which focus on headquarters and back-office roles, will help streamline operations without compromising its growth potential or competitiveness.
The Japanese advertising firm clocked a 62 billion yen (S$542 million) operating loss for the quarter ended June. It has revised its full-year forecasts and now expects an operating loss of 3.5 billion yen for the year, compared with its earlier prediction of a 66 billion yen operating profit.
ZF Group
German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen said on Oct 1 that it will retrench around a quarter of its staff, or around 7,600 people, from its powertrain technology unit by 2030.
This comes under a restructuring agreement with its works council and labour union, which includes options for early retirement, severance packages and a pledge to avoid forced redundancies.
These layoffs are part of the firm’s larger plan to eliminate 14,000 roles in Germany, with the auto industry beleaguered by weak electric vehicle demand and global trade tensions.
Bosch
Bosch will axe some 13,000 jobs across various locations in Germany until the end of 2030, the auto supplier announced on Sep 25.
The planned layoffs are part of cost-cutting measures to help it cope with harsh market conditions that have saddled it with an annual cost gap of 2.5 billion euros (S$3.77 billion).
It noted that lower demand has led to significant overcapacity in administration and sales as well as in development and production.
Lufthansa
The German airline on Sep 29 said it would slash 4,000 administrative jobs by 2030, its steepest cut since the Covid pandemic.
Shares of Europe’s largest airline group rose 2 per cent after it announced the move, which comes as it seeks higher profits through improved efficiency, with digitalisation and automation.
The company is embarking on a turnaround programme unveiled last year and aiming to improve its core airline.
In recent years, Lufthansa battled labour challenges and struggled to cut costs and pursue growth. It issued two profit warnings in 2024 and abandoned plans to hit its target of an 8 per cent operating margin that year.
Volvo
Volvo Cars’ closure of its satellite research and development office in Singapore, Volvo Tech Hub, affected 14 staff employed there.
On Sep 26, the Swedish automaker cited a challenging environment for the automotive industry as part of the reason behind the office’s closure.
It did not address queries on the exact date the hub was shuttered, and whether retrenched staff were reassigned to other roles in the company.
SoftBank
SoftBank Group will cut close to 20 per cent of its Vision Fund team globally, marking the third tranche of layoffs at its flagship fund since 2022.
Unlike previous retrenchment rounds that came as the firm faced losses, the latest cuts were issued after the fund in August recorded its strongest quarterly performance since June 2021.
The move comes as the Japanese investment firm pivots away from a broad portfolio of startup investments. It is moving towards AI bets in the US, including the proposed US$500 billion Stargate project, a tie-up with OpenAI to build a vast data centre network.
ANZ
Melbourne-based bank ANZ Group plans to cut 3,500 staff over the next year as its new chief executive Nuno Matos embarks on a turnaround strategy a few months into his tenure.
He became CEO in May and is striving to reclaim regulators’ trust and assuage investors’ concerns. He took over from Shayne Elliott, who faced regulatory inquiries in his last year as the bank’s chief.
The lender has reportedly already started retrenching middle- and back-office jobs in its institutional banking division, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Novo Nordisk
Novo Nordisk, the firm behind the popular weight loss drug Ozempic, will trim its headcount by 11.5 per cent and lay off 9,000 staff under a company-wide restructuring.
Some 5,000 of the job cuts would be made in its Denmark headquarters, the healthcare group said on Sep 10. In August, the firm froze global hiring for roles not deemed critical to its business.
The drugmaker is battling competition from US rival Eli Lilly and has forecast slower growth for 2025.
Its weight-loss medicine Wegovy is losing market share and has had slower growth, with copycat medicines made from the same ingredients on the market.
Accenture
The tech consultancy will lay off workers who cannot be retrained with AI skills while it grows its team of AI talent.
As part of a broader restructuring and push to prioritise AI, its CEO Julie Sweet on Sep 25 said it will be “exiting” staff who cannot be reskilled.
The company will also continue to hire talent with AI skills and has expanded its team of AI and data professionals to 77,000 in 2025, up from 40,000 in 2023.
Changi Travel Services
Changi Travel Services, a subsidiary of Changi Airport Group that offers foreign-exchange services, will cut 30 jobs as part of its restructuring to tackle shifting market conditions.
On Aug 21, it said that affected staff will get a severance package of four weeks for each year of employment. It did not elaborate on the segments of its business that would be hit.
Post-restructuring, the company said it would focus on ensuring sustainable growth.
Agoda
Agoda axed staff in its customer experience group (CEG), including around 50 staff in Singapore, in August.
The retrenchment exercise drew flak from unions and the authorities when news broke that the online travel site attempted to silence its retrenched workers.
In a closed-door virtual town hall on Aug 4, the Singapore-headquartered firm told staff it was cutting all CEG roles in its Singapore, Shanghai and Budapest locations. It cited cost issues, recruitment challenges and plans to improve operational efficiency.
A clause in its severance package agreement threatened to revoke severance entitlements of staff who reported the event to the authorities. The NTUC called Agoda’s attempt to silence retrenched staff “irresponsible”.
The company later apologised for its “inappropriate” clauses.
Tata Consultancy Services
The Indian tech company plans to shed 2 per cent of its workforce in its 2026 financial year as clients in the country’s IT sector hold back non-essential spending on technology amid inflation, weak demand and the uncertainty in US trade policy.
Around 12,200 jobs will be cut, mainly in middle and senior management roles, said Tata Consultancy Services on Jul 27.
While the company – India’s largest IT services provider – attributed the retrenchments to skill mismatches rather than AI-driven productivity gains, experts said that this heralds the start of a broader trend that could remove around half a million jobs over the next two to three years from the US$283 billion outsourcing sector.
Amazon
Amazon laid off staff from its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit.
Reuters reported that employees said they were sent an e-mail on Jul 17, informing them of their termination and that their devices were being deactivated.
Amazon declined to disclose the number of jobs that were cut, but sources familiar with the matter said that at least hundreds of people were let go.
Telstra Group
Australian telecom operator Telstra Group on Jul 9 announced 550 proposed job cuts, which is equivalent to less than 2 per cent of its work force.
It emphasised that the proposed layoffs were unrelated to its adoption of AI; rather, it was rooted primarily in a reset of its enterprise business.
The exercise follows a round of layoffs in 2024, when Telstra slashed 1,900 jobs in a drive to cut costs and transform its enterprise business.