Bloomberg News
LONDON - UBS AG plans to fire at least half the 300 people who work in PaineWebber Group Inc.'s London offices as Europe's third-largest banking company buys the U.S. brokerage, people familiar with the decision said.
UBS would dismiss mostly stock and bond traders, salespeople, and analysts who work with European institutional investors, the sources said. UBS Warburg, the Zurich company's investment bank, already has about 5,000 employees in London.
Martin Green, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. said the two companies have "some overlap, and the obvious place is in London."
UBS has said fewer than 360 of the 36,000 people who work in the merging companies' securities businesses would lose their jobs. That is low when compared with Chase Manhattan Corp., which plans to cut as many as 3,000 jobs worldwide - or about 10% of overlapping operations - as a result of its purchase of J.P. Morgan & Co.
Sarah Small, a spokeswoman for UBS Warburg in London, and David Walker, a spokesman for Paine Webber in New York, declined to give details on the job losses.
"The UBS Warburg and PaineWebber merger is highly complementary," Mr. Walker said. "Less than 1% of the combined staff will be affected."
PaineWebber International Ltd. sells securities, such as stocks, futures contracts, government bonds, and floating-rate notes, to European institutions. About two-thirds of its London staff, including back-office employees, clerical, and administrative personnel, work in fixed-income products.
