[Yonhap News Photo]
South Korea's embattled Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. disclosed a painful scheme Wednesday to reduce its entire workforce by up to 30 percent before the end of this year through early retirement.
The ailing shipyard gave up its original plan for a gradual reduction in its manpower by 2020 and decided to speed up redundancies, citing an aggravated liquidity crisis caused by dwindling orders and a prolonged business slump.
Daewoo Shipbuilding said the total number of workers would be cut down to less than 10,000 by the end of this year from 12,699 at the end of June.
Creditors have suggested that the shipyard may have to sell some of its facilities. It now has five docks including three floating and two dry docks.
Daewoo Shipbuilding and two other leading South Korean shipyards are under creditor-led restructuring to reduce debts that have weighed heavily on creditor banks.
The Daewoo shipyard has already presented a self-rehabilitation program worth 5.3 trillion won (4.7 billion US dollars) to reduce its cost and debt through asset sales and cuts in jobs and wages.
Last year the shipyard posted a record net loss of 5.13 trillion won, compared with a profit of 33 billion won a year earlier. Former executives have been arrested for window dressing and mismanagement.
Aju News Lim Chang-won = cwlim34@ajunews.com
reporter
Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
