Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Barco (Euronext: BAR; Reuters: BARBt.BR; Bloomberg: BAR BB) announced today a restructuring plan to align the organization with changing market demands and growth opportunities while enhancing the company’s long-term profitability.
Jan De Witte, Chief Executive Officer of Barco told us “To bolster Barco’s fitness to lead in an ever more global and dynamic market with rapidly evolving customer demands, it is imperative that Barco becomes more organizationally agile, responsive and customer service focused. Since launching our ‘focus to perform’ program in 2016, Barco has made measurable and steady progress primarily by rationalizing the business portfolio and part of its manufacturing footprint, and by implementing value engineering initiatives. With this plan we take the next step in our ‘focus to perform’ program and embrace Barco’s future as a successful hardware, software and services company”.
This latest realignment addresses specific aspects of Barco’s organizational structure, effectiveness, and agility particularly in the areas of product management, and commercial and service delivery processes. It also includes the re-investment of cost efficiencies towards certain growth initiatives, innovation and further business expansion in target geographies.
Barco intends to advance and deploy the following initiatives:
- Group software development departments into one global software development structure;
- Rebalance marketing, service delivery and project management capabilities for stronger regional empowerment;
- Re-align and strengthen marketing & product management capabilities to ensure end-to-end responsibility for delivering solutions encompassing software, hardware and services;
- Streamline organization and simplify decision making, while eliminating functional duplications across the organization ;
- Rationalize external spend and practices for procurement of external services.
The press release said that during 2019, the restructure might affect around 240 positions across the organization, of which around 55 are based in Belgium. Production worker positions are not impacted. In addition to enhancing business effectiveness, Barco expects to reduce its indirect expense-level by approximately 20 million euro by 2020, net of re-investments in strategic growth initiatives. As a result, Barco expects to record a restructuring charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018.
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