Wednesday 9 November 2011

Bglobal seeks £1.5m costs saving measures

Smart meters firm Bglobal said it has shed more than a quarter of its workforce this year as part of a drive to reduce its annualised costs by £2.5m.

In the first tranche during the spring, Lancashire-based Bglobal made about 15 redundancies as it sought to achieve savings of £1m.

It said in a trading update yesterday that those measures had not gone far enough and it had embarked on a second phase of cost reductions to save a further £1.5m.

Chief executive Tim Jackson-Smith said it involved about 50 redundancies. At the start of the year, Bglobal had a workforce of around 220. Bglobal, based in Darwen, said it remained profitable in the six months to September 30, but added that some customers in the industrial and commercial sectors had reduced their level of installations in response to a government announcement that a mass roll-out to the residential and SME markets would not start until 2014 at the earliest.

It also said its previous strategy of working with the big six energy companies to secure a large contract to install and read smart meters was no longer the way forward amid calls for more competition in the sector, and that it was working with an 'experienced retail player' to establish a new energy supplier to enter the market and establish relationships with end users.

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