STMicroelectronics said yesterday that a total of 1,300 jobs across its Malta and Morocco plants would be affected by the group’s plans to shed 4,500 jobs across its global operations this year.

The announcement came at a press conference in Paris yesterday, addressed by group managing director Alain Dutheil and group chief executive officer Carlo Bozotti, in the wake of Tuesday’s announcement that the multinational plans cutting thousands of its workers from its payroll across the world amid plunging profits and falling demand levels.

In addition to the job cuts announced for Malta and Morocco, the group, Bozotti specified yesterday morning, is also planning laying off 500 workers in Germany and the Netherlands. 1,100 American jobs are to be affected at the group’s plants in Carrollton, Texas and in Phoenix, Arizona. Another 1,600 employees are to be laid off from the group’s Asian operations – particularly in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.

That brings the global total of layoffs to 4,500, as announced by the group earlier this week. Of that total, 3,300 jobs will be trimmed from the group’s industrial operations.

Finance Minister Tonio Fenech, who is believed to have been recently engaged in difficult talks with ST with a view to keeping the Kirkop plant open – despite the global economic downturn, Malta’s comparatively high wages and exchange rate pressures between the euro and the dollar – was quoted in other sections of the media yesterday as having said the government was not aware of any plans for “mass redundancies” in Malta.

Speaking yesterday, both Bozotti and Dutheil did so in broad regional terms and as such did not go into country-by-country specifics of the group’s lay off plans – and only mentioned the countries that would be hit by the intentions to downsize its global staff complement of some 45,000 by close to 10 per cent.

Citing a “brutal downturn in the global economy”, Mr Dutheil yesterday said the overall objective was to reduce costs by USD700 million this year – just under the USD786 million in losses the group incurred last year as revealed in its financial statements this week.

Mr Bozotti added that in order to cope with falling sales, which are expected to be down by some 25 per cent over the year’s first quarter, the group would also be operating at just 50 per cent capacity over the first three months of the year and possibly maintain the decreased momentum over 2009’s second quarter as well.

“If necessary, we will reduce activity even more,” he said, adding that this was the first time the group had been called to deal with such a crisis.