Enjoying the stellar position of being the largest food and beverage multinational company in the world, we have recently announced our intentions of laying off employees in the future, as part of our new cost cutting plan in 2015.
We have planned out a comprehensive four year plan, which has been designed to help us cut our costs. A total of around 1600 to 1800 jobs are likely to be cut. The program has a value of $1 billion, and will help free up cash, so that we can use it to strengthen our brand and to further improve and increase its marketing footprint.
We have informed the employees of the expected layoffs, which will involve thousands of job cuts all over the world, with hundreds of employee layoffs in Atlanta. We have a plan to lay off around 500 of the employees within our headquarters.
The aim is to cut and save a total of $3 billion in costs, and ever since the announcement, there has been a reported rise of 1% in trading. We have clarified our intentions in a press release, where we shared that by ensuring job cuts, our intention was to streamline as well as simplify our structure.
We currently have around 130,600 workers employed worldwide and about 13,000 corporate employees, who are located in Atlanta. We have started informing our employees of the impending layoffs, within our Atlanta corporate office, International offices and U.S. operations.
We have also expressed our commitment to ensure equitable, compassionate and fair treatment of our employees throughout the entire laying off procedure.
The cutoffs were expected as a result of reports that documented our sluggish sales within the third quarter of the past year in North America, which is known as our most lucrative market. We announced job cuts to operate more efficiently as a company and ensure important cost cuts.
Our latest announcement is being seen as the biggest job cut since the one announced in 2000, which involved a layoff of 5,200 workers, with 2,000 of them being located in the metro Atlanta area.
The new job cuts are also being seen by experts as a way of ensuring proper restructuring, which would result in the creation of new jobs. Employees, who might lose their jobs due to the layoff, might apply when new jobs are made available again.
What we have in mind, is a four year restructuring plan and this cut off in 2015, is going to be a part of what we have in mind for the future.