US auto giant Ford confirmed Monday it was cutting about 3,000 jobs, mainly in North America and India, as the company pushes to accelerate its transition to electric vehicles.
Challenged by Tesla and other startups, traditional automakers have accelerated production of their electric models in recent years.
The restructuring involves 2,000 employees and 1,000 contractors, mainly in the United States, Canada and India, but will not affect factory workers, a spokesman told AFP.
US media had already reported in July that Ford, which employs around 182,000 people worldwide, was preparing to cut several thousand jobs.
“We have absolutely too many people in certain places, there’s no doubt about it,” President and CEO Jim Farley said on a conference call in late July.
“We have skills that no longer work … and we have jobs that need changing,” he said, without specifying the number of jobs to be eliminated.
The automaker previously said it would spend $50 billion on electric vehicle production by 2026.
And Ford announced in March that it would cut spending on conventional vehicles by up to $3 billion a year.
The job cuts announced on Monday are “consistent with what we’ve been describing for some time” and are intended to make Ford “more efficient,” the spokesman said.
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