1.1. Background
To HSBC's shareholders, they would be very happy. HSBC has exceeded its profit expectations in the first quarter of 2011. The bank generated a $11.5 billion pretax profit for the first half of 2011 up from $11.1 billion a year ago.
But to the bank’s employees, they may not dare to join the celebration. It is because most of them would become unemployed in the next second. HSBC announced its strategy to cut 30,000 jobs before 2013 for cost savings and shaping the business strategy. Due to the HSBC’s layoff plan, the bank creates tension between the shareholders and the employees, employees are afraid of losing their jobs. The morale and productivity of the company is then sharply decreased. Therefore, we are going to address the problems and find out solutions for HSBC in the coming parts.
In recent years, the whole world has been continuously facing economic recession. European Debt Crisis has also been highly concerned and has been posing a potential hazardous danger to the global business world. In the unfavorable economic environment, many small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which could just have a break-even business before, suffer great loss and eventually collapse despite struggle. Even multinational corporations (MNCs) have to work hard to find different innovative ways to increase profit margin and reduce cost in order to regain their competitiveness and survive in the market.
Different means are used by companies to strive against the bear market and they include partial automation, restructure of operations and so on. In fact, among all of them, the most frequently used method is downsizing, i.e. reducing the number of employees in a company, especially the middle management.
In this essay, in the context of the world's local bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC), two issues regarding downsizing will be addressed, which are the negative reactions from the