Thomas Cook To Cut 2,500 UK Jobs
Struggling Thomas Cook confirms it is cutting more jobs as its turnaround plan enters a new and deeper phase.

欧洲第二大、英国最大旅行社运营商托马斯-库克集团(Thomas Cook)宣布，作为其业务重组计划的一部分，将在英国裁员2500人，并关闭英国1069家分社中的195家。

Thomas Cook创办于1845年，是世界第一家旅行社，创始人Thomas·Cook被誉为“近代旅游业之父”，也是第一个组织团队旅游的人。但近年来受经济危机影响，公司的经营陷入困境，正在全球范围展开瘦身行动，以节约成本。

They did their restructuring in 2012, they effectively bought themselves 3 years to complete their restructuring at which point they are gonna have to refinance, I think, whether or not they’ll be successful, it depends on other things, whether or not they can make the cuts they need to make, but also what the market’s going to be like in 2015, where we don’t really have any certainty that liquidity in the debt market will sort of return by then to allow them to do a refinancing.

More shop closures at a time when the high streets starting to look very empty.

Indeed, but not really a massive surprise, and clearly they are trying to change the way they do business to put as much of it online, because of the costs implications of doing so. Having high street stores is expensive, it’s not merely a case of having to pay the rent, but you’ve also got to pay the rates and other costs associated with having a high street presence. And in reality, the question must be do we need to have a high street presence.

You would forgive a viewer from scratching his head here, looking at this and say it wasn’t so long ago that Thomas Cook and the Cooperative Group merged their travel agent operations and now Thomas Cook is in the process of furiously closing stores. I mean that deal not so long ago looks like piece of basting cake, I mean a crazy deal.

But they are two different things of course, because one is about having market share in economies of scale, but that doesn’t mean that you have to retain the high street presence to keep those economies of scale, in reality, the economies of scale are a war in the back office anyway.

But nonetheless, they have visibly committed themselves to taking on 300 odd high street stores, stores which presumably they knew they weren’t going to need, or not at all, they don’t need.

I mean, obviously their business sign is likely to have suffered some setbacks, and maybe they underestimated the market and the competition from online, as well as obviously not being able to predict, for example, the Arab Spring which is clearly having an effect on their business.