Just a week after ‘the purge’ began, Deutsche Bank is closing its office in Houston as part of a strategy to pare its U.S. operations, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg.
As part of Deutsche’s drastic restructuring, we noted previously, the purge began last week when Deutsche fired 300 U.S.-based investment bankers on Wednesday with another 100 pink slips expected over the next 24 hours.
In total, the biggest German bank plans to cut more than 1,000 jobs, or over 10%, of total US jobs in its initial restructuring phase. According to Bloomberg, the US hosts about 10,300 Deutsche Bank employees, or about a tenth of the firm’s global workforce.
In his earnings call comments, CEO Sewing stopped short of disclosing how many of the bank’s 97,103 jobs would be let go…
… while CFO James von Moltke also gave few clues as to how much of its massive 1.4 trillion euro ($1.7 trillion) balance sheet would be shed in the process. Von Moltke estimated restructuring costs for 2018 would rise to 800 million euros, up from an earlier estimate of 500 million euros, according to Bloomberg.
“These cutbacks will be painful, but they are unfortunately unavoidable if we want to be sustainably profitable in the best interests of our bank, our clients and our investors,” Sewing said.
And now, as Bloomberg reports, the bank will now shutter its Houston office, which has over 50 staff…
“We will continue to serve our Oil and Gas clients through our debt and corporate banking treasury products,” Mark Fedorcik, co-head of the U.S. investment bank, said in the memo to staff.
“We remain committed to the U.S. Power and Utilities sector which will be re-aligned under the Industrials coverage vertical in New York.”
A spokeswoman for the company confirmed the contents of the memo.
Bloomberg notes that it wasn’t immediately clear how many jobs would be cut, and how many would be relocated to other offices.
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