Peabody Energy Cuts Global Workforce

Oct. 22, 2012 - PRLog -- During the last week the company has reduced its workforce by close to a thousand, which was not announced in yesterday’s quarterly result.

The major miner did say it had identified roughly $US100M in annual savings, largely through workforce reductions, lower spending on outside services and elimination of contractors.

Speaking exclusively to Energy Publishing, a Peabody spokesperson said: “We made the difficult decision to reduce the workforce by approximately 925 across the globe, including Australia, the United States and corporate levels.

“Approximately 750 of these reductions come through reduced contractor usage, with the remainder active employees and unfilled open positions.”

Meanwhile, the company, while acknowledging the reality of ongoing global challenges, sees signs of better days ahead for the coal industry.

“While the global coal environment remains challenged, there are indications that markets are stabilizing through US gas-to-coal switching, higher European coal-fueled generation and increased China infrastructure spending,” Peabody CEO Greg Boyce said as Peabody announced Q3 revenues of US$2.06B.

EBITDA for the third quarter of $459.9M dropped from $508.5 in Q3 2011 while earnings per share of $0.46 where above analyst estimates of $0.34 per share.