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  • Let's turn to that news coming out of Dyson a little earlier in the afternoon that they are going to cut a third of their workforce in the UK.

  • That's about a thousand jobs at risk as part of a global restructure.

  • Well our business reporter Ben King has more on that decision to make those cuts.

  • Dyson is of course an extremely innovative consumer electronics company.

  • It makes everything from hair dryers to those famous cordless vacuum cleaners to washing machines and they have announced that there is a global restructure going on and this is the UK implication of it which means that up to a thousand of their 3,500 UK workers could be affected.

  • Now the chief executive Hanno Kirner has said that we operate in an increasingly fierce and competitive global market in which the pace of innovation and change is only accelerating he says and that's the reason why they're doing this restructure.

  • He adds of course that they say it's always incredibly painful to lose talented employees and colleagues.

  • Now they say that the UK will remain a hub of research and development but over the past few years the company's centre of gravity has been moving towards Asia which makes up the majority of its customer base.

  • Its headquarters is now in Singapore and the majority of its manufacturing takes place in countries such as Malaysia and the Philippines and Singapore.

  • Now to look at their financials looking at the latest set of they made over a billion pounds of profit so it's still a very profitable company even though that's slightly down from the year before so we don't really know all that much about the financial drivers behind this decision but it's worth remembering of course that Sir James Dyson the founder and the majority owner of the company has been very critical of UK government policy in recent years.

  • Last year during the Sunak administration he wrote to the Times criticising what he called woeful policies such as working from home and rocketing corporation tax and he said that the company would be investing far more in modern forward-looking places elsewhere.

  • Ben when are they likely to make clear where the actual job losses will fall who will be made redundant and who will stay on?

  • Well we don't know they have sites in the UK in Bristol and a couple of sites in Wiltshire including their Malmsbury HQ.

  • The normal process for making redundancies is that you announce the intention to to make them and then there's a consultation with workforce which is mandated in law and that's a process that can take up to three or six months sometimes longer depending on the company so that's something that we don't know yet it may even be that Dyson hasn't completely decided.

  • Often these redundancy processes do take quite a long time to work out so this is just the beginning of what will probably be quite a long process for Dyson employees and management.

Let's turn to that news coming out of Dyson a little earlier in the afternoon that they are going to cut a third of their workforce in the UK.

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