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Dixons Carphone bye-bye'd 800 staff since merger

Half went from Dixons' Hemel HQ as folk say 'meh' to Acton

Some 800 UK staffers have been made redundant or put at risk of redundancy since the mega merger between Carphone Warehouse and Dixons Retail, The Channel can reveal.

This includes 400 staff at Dixons’ Hemel Hempstead-based HQ that did not want to relocate to Carphone’s equivalent office in Acton, a driving distance of a little over 25 miles.

The office move is set to take place by the end of October, and staffers affected by this were offered £10,000, paid over 18 months, if they agreed to the transfer, according to sources.

One insider told us the costs of revamping the dusty old Hemel building was considered too high, and Acton has a larger footfall so has more room for expansion.

The Frankencorp is also looking at a satellite office in Hemel to keep chugging along for another twelve months after the October deadline.

The remaining 400 job cuts came across the business, we are told, but at the same time the company is understood to have employed 800 new full time employees, not including recruitment of Phones4U people.

Dixons Carphone refused to comment to us, but in a merger document last May, the directors outlined expected “synergies” and cost savings resulting from the borg of “at least £80m on a recurring basis”.

It stated that one half of the “identified synergies” are expected to come from “integrated mobile retailing and procurement synergies” and the other half from rent and other infrastructure costs.

The strategy report confirmed that as a result of the “rationalisation of certain operational and support functions” the current workforce will become some two per cent lighter.

On the flip side, the company anticipates the employee base swelling by four per cent by the end of 2016.

“Taken together with the job creation opportunities, it is expected there will be a net increase of approximately two per cent of the combined group’s full-time equivalent employees as a result of the merger,” says the merger document.

Dixons employs more than 31,000 staff across nearly 1,500 stores in Europe. Carphone had roughly 12,000 staff working in around 2,800 stores. ®

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