Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA is to lay off another 7,000 people – but they do these things differently in Italy, so despite the fact that Olivetti is a private company with no state involvement, the announcement came not from Ivrea but from the Minister of Labour, Carlo Donat Cattin. Of the cuts, 4,000 will come in Italy, 3,000 in the rest of Europe. The company had hinted in September that the 3,500 cuts announced in June would not be enough, and the new bad news was revealed to the minister during meetings with chairman Carlo de Benedetti on Monday. Commenting on the cuts, which will bring the workforce down to 45,200 from 59,500 at the beginning of 1989, Olivetti said that while it reckoned it was doing better than the competition, the state of the market was worse than it had forecast, so that on top of the problems of a squeeze on margins that it experienced last year, there was now a serious lack of demand to contend with as well.
