Herald News Services: Saturday March 27, 2010 2:17 AM

Jobs – Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s workforce in the Netherlands declined by 2.8 per cent to 11,323 employees last year after the company announced a restructuring program under new chief executive Peter Voser.

BLOOMBERG INTERVIEW: DAVOS 2010:

Voser Says Shell `More Pessimistic’ on First-Half Demand

The Sunday Times

Shell May Cut More Jobs as Energy Demand Recovery Remains Muted

January 29, 2010, 07:22 AM EST

By Fred Pals and Francine Lacqua

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s second-largest oil company, may need to cut more jobs this year to control operating costs as a recovery in energy demand waits until the second half.

“It’s normal in any business that you have to go further and you have to operate your operating expenditure in a very tough way,” Chief Executive Officer Peter Voser said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Davos, Switzerland. “As part of that, it may also mean that some more people have to go.”

Voser took over from Jeroen van der Veer in July and complained that Shell’s operations had become “too complex.” Voser merged units and cut about 5,000 jobs, including senior management posts. About 15 percent of Shell’s refining capacity was placed under review, while the company is also scaling back expansion in production from Canadian tar sands.

Swiss-born Voser inherited the industry’s biggest spending program in 2009, amounting to $32 billion, in the middle of a global economic crisis that forced oil companies to delay some projects and cancel others. Shell cut operating costs by about $1 billion in the first nine months of last year.

“I’m a little bit more cautious on the recovery,” Voser said. “We still see some effects from the stimulus package into 2010, some of the consumption-driven demand is not coming back, so I’m rather more pessimistic for the first half of the year than I am maybe for the whole year or the second half.”

Voser’s Priority

Voser’s priority is to revive production growth with new projects in Qatar and Malaysia after output fell below 3 million barrels of oil equivalent a day. Shell has spent billions of dollars on unconventional oil projects such as the gas-to- liquids plant in Qatar and is also venturing into Iraq with exploration and production deals.

Shell is looking at Venezuela, Voser said. “We are studying the bids which are now coming into the wider domain in Venezuela, and we will decide if we bid or not in the future,” he said.

Venezuela’s oil ministry is taking offers from companies that paid $2 million each to bid for the minority stakes in three new projects that will pump and refine oil from the Carabobo areas of the Orinoco Belt. The winners will get a 40 percent stake in the projects.

–Editors: Will Kennedy, John Buckley.

To contact the reporters on this story: Fred Pals in Amsterdam at +31-20-589-8563 or fpals@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Guy Collins at +44-20-7330-7521 or guycollins@bloomberg.net

SOURCE ARTICLE

It’s unclear how many of Shell’s 13,000 employees in Houston will be affected by the migration plans. Partly, that’s because company officials are still deciding which jobs will stay or go abroad, and are rolling out the plans in phases that run into next year. But at least a few divisions in Houston are preparing to be downsized dramatically.

FT: Shell CEO on debt, gas, Iraq, mergers, and more

November 26, 2009 12:01am

by Ed Crooks

The reorganisation “moved very fast” in 2009, Mr Voser said.

• For 15,000 posts, people have had to re-apply for their jobs.

• About 50,000 people work in the areas affected by cuts, out of Shell’s total workforce of 102,000, and in those affected areas 10 per cent of the staff have gone.

• Even in the newly-created projects and technology division, which is a centre of expertise for the group to draw on, 1,800 jobs have been cut from a workforce of 10,000 as duplicated roles are abolished.

• There will be more redundancies next year, too, although he refused to put a figure on how many.

FULL FT ARTICLE (SUBSCRIPTION)

Voser, meanwhile, who took over the CEO post at Shell in July, is orchestrating a major revamp at the Anglo-Dutch oil giant that includes job and cost cuts.

“I will not talk about actual numbers of staff, (the) number of reductions, because quite clearly this is not about staff numbers,” Voser said.