MILAN | Italian bank UniCredit announced Wednesday it will shed 18,200 jobs by 2018 as its third-quarter profits slid 30 percent mainly due to charges on businesses in Croatia and Ukraine.
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It also specified that the planned job cuts would come from the sale of its Ukrainian unit and the planned tie-up of its asset manager Pioneer and Santander Asset Management.
Job cuts will take place both in local and global corporate centers as well as in commercial banks in Italy, Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe, the lender said.
Net interest for the quarter dropped 6.3 percent to 2.93 billion euros from 3.12 billion euros in the previous year.
UniCredit’s chief executive Federico Ghizzoni described the plan as “rigorous and at the same time ambitious…in a persistently tough macroeconomic environment, marked by historically low interest rates and decelerating worldwide economic growth”.
UniCredit said it was targeting cost cutting measures worth 1.6 billion euros by 2018. Last year, a European-level health check of lenders revealed weakness in its capital position, although UniCredit passed the tests.
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Inflation accelerated slightly in October while consumer confidence rose from 113.0 in September to 116.9, the highest reading since February 2002, according to the National Statistics Institute.
