CALGARY – Shaw Communications made its first significant restructuring move under new CEO Brad Shaw on Wednesday, letting more than 500 people go.
“About 150 were VP, director, supervisor, that sort of level,” company president Peter Bissonnette told Cartt.ca. “It was just over 500.” The payroll reduction will result in $30-$40 million in annual savings, he added.
The hardest hit areas were Calgary, where approximately 150 were let go; the Vancouver area, with about 100 cuts (including the closure of the company’s Langley warehouse); and Saskatoon, where a 58-person call centre is being shuttered (traffic to that call centre will now head to Winnipeg and the company’s 700-person regional centre). The rest of the cuts were spread across the company.
“We really looked at our organization and we said ‘we’ve grown tremendously over the last three years but we’ve added significantly more costs than we’ve added revenues,’” added Bissonnette.
“We had about 18 different regional divisions and we said that doesn’t make sense and let’s bring it down to larger regions and remove some of the overhead associated with that.” Shaw will now have seven regional divisions.
Like many cable operators, Shaw is coming to grips with a level of growth that is plateauing. After adding hundreds of thousands of voice customers and high speed internet customers, those market segments are nearing maturity, while Shaw’s traditional cable TV business is under attack from a nicely tricked-out IPTV alternative from Telus, Optik TV.
The company is also in the midst of a wireless build-out whose costs will be in the hundreds of millions, all told. It will launch the fourth leg of the quad-play bundle in 2012.
“We’ve always been a lean machine and very efficient,” explained Bissonnette about the cutbacks. “We’ve always looked at our cost structure and as we grew and grew, we probably took on more cost than we should have.”
“Now that we’re in less of a growth mode, it’s time to be really scrupulous about our structure and that’s what we’ve done.
“The competitive environment is much more significant now than it has ever been and we want to make sure our organizational structure reflects that.”
– Greg O’Brien
