Vodafone plans to cut 2,300 jobs in Germany as part of efforts to improve performance in the country, the telecoms company announced on Monday. The redundancies form part of a broader cost-reduction strategy targeting annual expense savings of more than €2 billion across European and shared operations by 2030.
The company had already reduced its workforce across UK and European divisions by 3,000 roles during the first half of the year. This coincided with removing €200 million in expenses across its European business, including €50 million of savings in the UK following its agreement to merge with Three UK in 2025 to form VodafoneThree. Shared services operations, which handle administrative support functions from hubs in India and eastern Europe, were also affected by redundancies, though Vodafone did not disclose the precise number of positions eliminated within the UK.
Vodafone's group chief executive Margherita Della Valle said: "I am very happy about our overall group performance, but Germany is not yet where it needs to be. We have a clear action plan in progress, which is structurally simplifying our German operations and improving customer satisfaction across all of our services." Since taking the top job in 2023, she has overseen 11,000 roles axed between then and the end of September this year and achieved annual cost cuts of 700 million euros so far.
The spending cuts have enabled Vodafone to increase its full-year earnings guidance. The company now anticipates between €13.2 billion and €13.4 billion in earnings, implying growth of around 6 to 8 per cent on an organic basis. This is up from previous guidance of €13 billion to €13.3 billion when it last raised its outlook in July. The improved forecast comes despite Vodafone swinging to a statutory pre-tax loss of 373 million euros in the six months to September 30 from profits of 2.1 billion euros a year earlier, driven partly by a 4.85 billion euro writedown in Germany and other impairment charges.