BP officials confirmed today that the company is laying off employees, and workers at its Houston office will be affected.
Officials didn’t give an exact number of employees who will be laid off.
In a statement, the company said:
The shape and size of BP has changed significantly over the past few years through major divestments and reorganization. We are now a more focused company.
Further, the industry has been through an inflationary period that has reached an inflection point with the declining oil prices. The current price environment has caused operators to look at their cost structure and undertake efforts to drive efficiencies.
BP has divested a number of assets, and did not fully adjust organizational structure and staffing in line with those divestments. We are working at a rapid pace, while being thoughtful about the best ways to make safe and sustainable change.
Our safety and compliance will not be compromised as we realign our organization to our existing asset base and environment.
In our Gulf of Mexico business, our simplification and efficiency activities are located primarily on our functional staff located in the Houston offices. All changes have been reviewed in cooperation with our safety and operations team.
We expect all organizational changes to be completed by the close of the first quarter 2015, with staff announcements to come in the next few weeks.
Company officials said in the statement “we expected to incur non-operating restructuring charges of about $1 billion in total over the next five quarters (including 4Q 2014) as part of a wider ongoing effort to simplify across our Upstream and Downstream activities and corporate functions.”
“We have already been working very hard over these past 18 months or so to right-size our organization as a result of completing more than $43 billion of divestments,” BP CEO Bob Dudley said. “The simplification work we have already done is serving us well as we face the tougher external environment. We continue to seek opportunities to eliminate duplication and stop unnecessary activity that is not fully aligned with the group’s strategy.”
