- Exxon is cutting costs and shrinking its workforce to stay afloat amid the worst oil downturn in a generation.
- Here’s everything we know about the cuts, from layoffs to reduced employee benefits.
- Do you have information about Exxon? Reach out to this reporter at bjones@businessinsider.com or through the encrypted messaging app Signal at 646-768-1657.
- For more stories like this, sign up here for our weekly energy newsletter.
Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company, suffered a historic blow in 2020.
For the first time on record, the firm reported a loss three quarters in a row, from January through September. Analysts expect the company to report a loss in the last three months of 2020, as well, according to Bloomberg data.
The obvious culprit is the coronavirus, which sapped demand for gasoline and jet fuel, causing the price of oil to plummet. But Exxon’s market value began falling years before the pandemic, driven down in part by souring investor interest in fossil fuels.
Now down in market value about 30%, compared to a year ago, Exxon has been cutting costs. The result is big headcount reductions and other measures. Here’s everything we know so far.
Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images
Exxon was restructuring before the pandemic hit
The firm reorganized its downstream division in 2018 and the upstream division in 2019. That year, Exxon also established a new business unit — Global Projects — focused on project development.
When the price of oil crashed, Exxon said those changes helped, but further cuts would be needed.
“I wish I could say we were finished, but we are not,” Woods said in an email to employees in October. “We still have some significant headwinds, more work to do and, unfortunately, further reductions are necessary.”
Today, Exxon is organized into eight trimmed-down business divisions with a president for each. It’s not clear to what extent the company’s core structure changed, if at all, in response to the spending and workforce cuts. (Exxon declined to comment on the organization chart we shared.)
We mapped out those divisions, in addition to seven other core areas of the company, in an exclusive org chart. It includes 138 of Exxon’s top employees.
Exxon is trimming its global workforce by 15%, which includes steep cuts in the US and Europe
As Business Insider first reported, Exxon is slashing its global workforce by 15%, or 14,000 people, through 2022, relative to the company’s headcount in 2019. The cuts include both contractors and employees.
- Up to 1,900 of the job cuts will be in the US, including at least 723 from the Houston area. Click here for a timeline of the reductions and insight into how Exxon will decide which workers to lay off, as revealed by leaked documents we obtained.
- Another 1,600 jobs or so could be cut in Europe. We explain which roles are at risk here, and you can read the letter the firm’s CEO, Darren Woods, sent employees following the cuts here.
- Exxon also said it would lay off about 300 workers in Canada, starting in December, according to a public press release and an internal memo we obtained. The cuts are involuntary and most of them will take place by February of 2021, per the memo.
- In addition, the company launched a voluntary redundancy program in Australia. It’s not clear how many roles the program will impact.
- Part of Exxon’s approach to shrinking spending is sending jobs overseas to cheap centers of labor, we reported.
Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images
The firm used its employee-ranking process to cut workers in the weeks after oil markets crashed
In April, Exxon quietly made a change to the way it ranks employees, forcing managers to dub a larger chunk of employees as poor performers, putting them at risk of being cut.
- Leaked audio from an internal meeting suggests not all employees placed in that category were, in fact, poor performers. That’s why workers we spoke to called the change to the ranking system a layoff in disguise.
- Exxon’s performance-based cuts, initiated this summer, put as much as 10% of the company’s workforce at risk of losing their jobs. You can find all the details of the ranking system and the April change here.
- The government of Singapore is probing Exxon’s labor practices after employees raised concerns about the company’s performance-based cuts.
Other changes to curb spending
Exxon has said publicly that it began restructuring years before the pandemic drove down the price of oil, in part, to curb spending. In the last few months, however, the firm has made a handful of other changes to cut costs.
- Over the summer the company suspended a handful of employee benefits including its matching program for retirement savings, as Business Insider first reported.
- Earlier this year the company slashed its capital spending budget for 2020 by $10 billion, or 30%, down to $23 billion. Next year Exxon plans to spend even less.
What we’re watching
- The job cuts Exxon has announced so far were determined by workforce reviews Exxon has been carrying out on a country-by-country basis. The company could announce results from additional reviews soon.
- While Exxon has curbed spending, the firm’s “dividend sustainability remains challenged absent higher commodity prices,” Morgan Stanley said in early November. We’ll be keeping an eye on the dividend.
- Exxon is placing a huge bet on Guyana, a small South American country with big oil resources. Expect continued focus there (partly because oil production is cheap).
- The company will report fourth-quarter earnings on February 2. Investors will be watching to see the scale of loss that it reports for the full year.
Do you have information about Exxon? Reach out to this reporter at bjones@businessinsider.com or through the messaging app Signal at 646-768-1657.
This story was originally published on November 6. We updated it to include new information about the company’s reorganization.
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