Lendlease must axe thousands more jobs, Allan Gray says, as chair Ullmer exits
Fund manager Allan Gray has called for the property giant to cull 75% of its corporate staff and shutter its Americas, Asia and Europe developments as part of an ongoing activist campaign.
Having just drawn blood from the Lendlease boardroom, activist investor and contrarian fund manager Allan Gray is winding up for another big swing at the construction company, demanding three in four office staff be cut in a major overhaul.
Speaking on Wednesday just hours after Lendlease confirmed chair Michael Ullmer would step down along with director Nicola Wakefield Evans, Allan Gray managing director Simon Mawhinney said more employees would follow them out the door of the underperforming ASX company.
“They have a huge cost base at Lendlease. Their corporate or unallocated cost as a percentage of their invested capital is 2%. So before they've even woken up in the morning they’re behind 2% and that’s a hard thing to recover,” Mawhinney told Capital Brief on the sidelines of the Allan Gray & Orbis Investment Forum in Sydney.
“I think that minus two should be a minus half [percent], so three quarters of the staff in the corporate office should probably disappear.”
