Groupe Bull SA has announced on Friday that it will make a further 1,100 layoffs in France this year. The news comes only days after The Confederation Francaise Democratique de Travail, the French national trade union, forecast that the company would make 1,500 redundancies. Bull made the announcement at a meeting of the Comite Centrale on Friday, saying that 475 will come from manufacturing and logistics, 240 from sales, 220 from the systems and products division and 165 from general staff. The Bull head-count in France at the end of 1991 was 16,400, while the worldwide figure was 39,800, down from 47,300 in 1989. Domestic problems aside, Bull has announced two new customer sites in Russia – St Petersburg and Moscow – where it has installed the former Soviet Union’s first automated teller machines. The Skerbank’s systems include workstations, departmental servers, local area networks and teller machines, and the bank’s managing director has committed to extend the banking systems throughout Russia where there are over 78,000 branches. Also, the Muscovite commercial radio station, Europa Plus, has signed for computerisation of its offices in the capital and in St Petersburg.
