Boeing to shed jobs

Boeing's commercial airplanes division will take the biggest cuts as about 4,000 jobs are to go by mid-2016. On top of that, the planemaker announced Wednesday that another roughly 550 jobs would be lost in a division that conducting flight and lab tests.

Among the job cuts, some 1,600 positions in the commercial airplanes division were planned to be made redundant through voluntary layoffs, while the rest of the cuts were expected to be completed by leaving open positions unfilled, spokesman Doug Alder said.

"While there is no employment reduction target, the more we can control costs as a whole the less impact there will be to employment," Alder told the news agency Reuters.

The job cuts would affect about 3 percent of the company's 161,000 workforce and also included hundreds of executive and managerial positions, Boeing said.

In February, Ray Conner, chief executive of Boeing's airplane business, warned employees that job cuts were necessary to "win in the market, fund our growth and operate as a healthy business."

At the end of 2015, Boeing's fourth-quarter profit fell 30 percent on the year to $1.03 billion (910 million euros) as the aircraft maker took a $569-million charge related to its 747 jumbo jet program. Sales in the quarter fell 4 percent to $23.6 billion.

For the full year 2016, the company said it expected revenue between $93 billion and $95 billion dollars, missing analyst expectations.

uhe/hg (Reuters, AFP, dpa)