Proman to cut jobs amid Trinidad gas constraints

Ke­jan Haynes

Pro­man is re­duc­ing its glob­al work­force, cit­ing con­strained and un­cer­tain gas sup­plies in Trinidad and the re­sult­ing im­pact on the com­pa­ny’s mar­gins.

In a mes­sage to em­ploy­ees, Pro­man CEO David Cas­sidy said the com­pa­ny does not al­ways have enough gas in Trinidad to op­er­ate all its plants con­sis­tent­ly at full ca­pac­i­ty.

“The im­me­di­ate chal­lenge is in Trinidad,” Cas­sidy said, adding that the com­pa­ny must align its cost base and op­er­at­ing mod­el with cur­rent pro­duc­tion lev­els.

He said the medi­um-term out­look for in­creased gas vol­umes was en­cour­ag­ing, but Pro­man had to take ac­tion now to pro­tect its fi­nan­cial po­si­tion and main­tain op­er­a­tional flex­i­bil­i­ty.

Fol­low­ing a re­view of how work is or­gan­ised and re­sources are al­lo­cat­ed glob­al­ly, Cas­sidy said Pro­man had im­ple­ment­ed work­place ef­fi­cien­cy mea­sures and tar­get­ed cost-sav­ing mea­sures.

“As part of this strate­gic re­view, we have al­so as­sessed our op­er­at­ing mod­els across the busi­ness, and con­se­quent­ly we are re­duc­ing in head­count to es­tab­lish a man­pow­er staffing mod­el that aligns with our busi­ness needs to­day,” he said.

Pro­man is al­so ex­pand­ing its shared-ser­vices mod­el where ap­pro­pri­ate.

Cas­sidy did not say how many em­ploy­ees will be af­fect­ed or spec­i­fy how many of the job cuts will be in Trinidad.

He said the mea­sures would be man­aged “re­spon­si­bly, re­spect­ful­ly and in line with lo­cal re­quire­ments”, with lo­cal lead­ers ex­pect­ed to com­mu­ni­cate de­tails about the tim­ing, process and lo­cal im­pacts to their teams.

Pro­man op­er­ates methanol and oth­er chem­i­cal pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties in Trinidad. Cas­sidy said the re­duced mar­gins stem­ming from the cur­rent con­di­tions in Trinidad have wider fi­nan­cial im­pli­ca­tions for the Pro­man Group.

Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed Pro­man for com­ment on the head­count re­duc­tions and their po­ten­tial im­pact on its Trinidad op­er­a­tions, but had not re­ceived a re­sponse at the time of pub­li­ca­tion.