MOL to Cut Jobs

MOL is a name that many of you may not be too familiar with, unless you spend a lot of time thinking about energy providers. For those of you who are not familiar with the company here is a look at how they have chosen to describe themselves, “MOL Group is market leader in three countries, has operations in more than 40 countries and employs more than 31,000 people worldwide.  The group’s upstream operation includes exploration activities in 11 and production in seven countries worldwide. MOL Group also operates five refineries and two petrochemical units under integrated supply chain management, in Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia and Italy. MOL Group also owns a network of over 1 700 filling stations in Central & South Eastern Europe in 11 countries with seven brands. MOL Group is ranked 412 on the Forbes list of the largest companies of the world.”

Sadly the company is getting ready to make a major reduction in force that will set it up  to lose about 12 percent of its workforce when all is said and done. That is a cut of about 700 workers. This news is a little bit of a shock when you consider that the company’s most recent release was about hiring on new workers,“MOL Group today launched the second round of its biggest recruitment campaign in 11 countries aiming to hire 80 international experts to work for the newly set up MOL Group international headquarter in Budapest. The job announcements cover expert positions in functional areas, such as procurement, human resources, information technology, and also business fields, like project and sales managers and analysts. The application starts today on the website of http://www.randstad.hu/bethechange and the deadline is 26 September 2012.”

The company made this change because of a loss of more than 90% of its revenues in a single year. This serious loss of revenue is a rather big about face from how things looked at the end of 2012, “High crude oil prices supported Upstream results while external conditions proved unexpectedly tough on Downstream operations. However, despite the developments in Syria and further tightening of the regulatory environment, we were still able to grow further in 2011. Strong operating results derived from our diversified international Upstream portfolio. More than 70% of Group EBITDA was generated by our Upstream Division with half our operating results coming from outside Hungary as the share of international operations increases year by year…We expect 2012 to be a challenging year, such as force majeure in Syria and a depressed refinery environment year-to-date; however we believe that MOL Group is well-positioned to deliver outstanding growth in the mid-term. Our key tasks are to unlock the value of our exploration portfolio and increase our reserve base, which will provide a solid basis for mid-term production growth in Upstream. The next two years will be crucial for operations in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since we are planning to drill two exploration and seven appraisal wells. In Downstream, our aim is to maintain the leading position of our core assets and improve the overall profitability of the Division through comprehensive efficiency programmes.”