Vodafone Italy set to cut 1,130 jobs

Vodafone has decided its Italian arm needs a new cunning plan and, as is so often the case, it’s likely to involve a bunch of redundancies.

Right now we’re dependent on a press release written in Italian and the best efforts of Google Translate, so bear with us. Vodafone Italia seems to be announcing a new industrial strategy, that special kind that requires immediate consultation with trades unions. Since unions only tend to get involved when there are mass lay-offs, that can only mean one thing.

In stark contrast with its previous apparent optimism about the Italian market, Vodafone now sees extraordinary competitive pressure in in that country, which has led to a drastic drop in prices and hence a sharp contraction of the whole telecoms sector. As a result Vodafone’s bottom line in Italy is heading in the wrong direction and something’s got to give.

While a lot may have been lost in Google translation, the remedial measures seems to follow the standard clichés of streamlining, agile operating models and a focus on margin to enable continued investment. All this means cutting overheads, which is traditionally done through redundancies. The announcement speaks of 1,130 efficiencies.

In hindsight the writing has been on the wall for a little while. Vodafone was one of the big spenders in the recent Italian 5G spectrum auction and subsequently announced it was going to do a nice lot of infrastructure sharing with fellow big spender TIM. With new entrant Iliad contributing to the aforementioned competitive pressure we would be surprised if this is the last bit of streamlining news to come from the Italian telecoms market.