21-03-2016

AlmavivA Contact announces a company reorganization plan

Rome, 21 March 2016 – Due to the increasingly structural nature of the crisis of the Italian call center industry, AlmavivA Contact – an AlmavivA Group company, one of the leading providers of outsourced CRM services worldwide – announced today to the Trade Unions and the Ministry of Labor and Welfare that it intends to axe a number of jobs, as part of a broader company reorganization plan.

The plan aims to achieve the necessary objective of ensuring balanced industrial conditions and initiating, in the medium term, a process for re-launching the company’s market position in the Italian operational CRM sector.

In a market scenario dominated by distorting factors, which are continuously and deeply altering the competitive environment, from the failed observance of the regulations governing the relocation of businesses in non-EU countries to the opportunistic use of employment incentives, marked by the gradual drop of the total volumes processed in Italy and the continued reduction of service prices, AlmavivA Contact has recorded – between 2011 and 2015 – a 33% shrinking of revenues on the Italian market.

The decisions adopted, to date, by the Company, with a view to supporting its production, strengthening its national rooting and safeguarding the continuity of its workforce, also through the longstanding application of job protection measures, to manage redundant staff members, are no longer sufficient, without corrective projects, to tackle the critical structural situation, which, in the last two years alone, has caused losses for the Company totaling 16 million euros, in the Italian CRM sector, and has already entailed recapitalization by the shareholders for approx. 50 million euros.

Due to the unsustainability of the activities carried out in the current conditions, it has now become necessary and urgent for AlmavivA Contact to undertake a comprehensive reorganization effort, along the lines of reducing costs, improving the efficiency of the logistical arrangements, valorizing the levers of commercial development, based on proprietary technologies, and streamlining the organizational structure.

At the same time, taking into account the principal economic and production indicators of each site, the plan envisages staff reductions totaling 2,990 employees in the company sites in Rome (up to 920 people), Naples (up to 400 people) and Palermo (up to 1670 people).

This plan will affect 6% of the Group’s workforce, globally (50,000 people in 7 countries). Over the next 75 days, based on the applicable regulations, the Company will enter into discussions with the Trade Unions, to examine the plan’s social and employment impact.