Bad news for employment at Orange: 700 jobs cut

• Orange management wants 700 jobs cut in its Orange Business subsidiary
• The plan must be presented to the unions on Wednesday, and requires their agreement
• This B to B activity is threatened by the rise of players such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams

This is bad news for employment at Orange. According to information from World confirmed by The echoes, the management wishes to launch a project of collective contractual rupture on 700 positions in its Orange Business division (formerly known as Orange Business Services). The latter currently has 5,700 employees.

To be validated, this procedure must first receive the agreement of the unions, and the latter are also convened this Wednesday to discuss this project. But according to our colleagues, nothing is won, and some staff representatives have already expressed their concern about a “cost reduction” policy. If this strategy does not work, management could opt for a voluntary departure plan.

A turning point for Orange

Either way, Christel Heydemann, the CEO of Orange, seems determined to act. She also explained that Orange Business requires a “intense restructuring plan”when unveiling its strategy plan for 2025 last month.

In concrete terms, the division’s operating profit has fallen by 35% in three years. This is starting to weigh heavily on the group’s finances with a turnover of 7.9 billion euros in 2022. If the cloud, data management and cyber defense activities continue to grow, and should not be affected by these job cuts, the same does not apply to historical sectors such as the installation of telephone servers and landlines.

It must be said that the Covid has been there, and that habits have been taken. Companies are using services such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams much more and the fixed telephone now seems dated. This is reflected in the figures with a drop of 500 million in turnover on this activity in three years, reports The world.

An asset disposal strategy

This is a turning point for Orange, which had not carried out any direct job cuts since the wave of suicides among France Telecom employees in the 2000s. Management did not wish to comment on the information reported by our colleagues.

In any case, Orange is continuing its recovery strategy, which also involves asset disposals. One thinks in particular of OCS which was sold to Canal+, or even of the portfolio of Orange Bank customers which should intervene soon.