Coca-Cola Amatil IT jobs in the firing line

Coca-Cola Amatil could cut up to 70 positions from its Australian IT division as it chases savings of $100 million over the next three years.

A CCA spokeswoman confirmed that IT would be among three business divisions to bear the brunt of plans to cut 260 jobs from to the company’s back-office operations announced to the market today. The spokeswoman said that the IT division would share a roughly equal burden of the cuts alongside the company’s human resources and finance departments.

The majority of the cull will take place from the company’s Sydney operations.

“Where possible we’ll make every attempt to give effect to these changes through natural attrition and mutually agreed arrangements. We employ 14,000 people across our business and that includes 5,000 in Australia, so you have to take it in that context,” the spokeswoman added.

The cuts are the first that CCA has announced since delivering the results of its strategic review in October. The review aimed to address deteriorating market conditions across the group which have destabilised its revenue base and put its earnings per share into negative territory.

In its October strategic review CCA announced that it was chasing a return to mid single-digit growth in earnings per share over the next three years with “no further decline expected after 2014”.

At the time CCA’s group managing director, Alison Watkins said, “we are confident that the combination of revenue and cost initiatives we have underway will restore the business to growth. The pace of recovery will however depend on the success of revenue initiatives in Australia and Indonesian economic factors”.

The Australian business has also been called on find savings of $100 million over the next three years.

CCA has also invested heavily in a new IT platform to improve its sales and logistics functions over the past five years.

CCA’s spokeswoman confirmed that the new platform was driving the company’s ability to reduce its headcount.