The traditional Hamburg coffee roasting company Tschibo has slipped into a crisis and is reacting to it with staff reductions. 300 jobs are to be cut. Attempts will be made to use predominantly socially acceptable options such as early retirement or not filling vacant positions. "However, we cannot rule out redundancies for operational reasons," a Tchibo spokesman told the F.A.Z.

Susanne Preuß

Business correspondent in Hamburg.

  • Follow I follow

Most of the jobs are to be cut in the administration in Hamburg. By mid-July, the management wants to inform the affected employees, the spokesman confirmed. First, the "world" had reported on it and pointed out that it was about the first major job cuts since the turn of the millennium.

Tchibo currently has 7,100 employees in Germany and 11,200 worldwide. As a result of the staff reductions, the number of employees in Germany will return to pre-Corona pandemic levels, the Tchibo spokesman added. It is a matter of reconciling the structure with the increased costs. "Everything went up: the transport prices, the energy costs, the gas costs for the roastery..." The cost increases could not be completely offset by higher prices.

Coffee accounts for half of sales

A few weeks before the start of the war against Ukraine, when freight rates in the shipping sector had reached their record highs, Tchibo had heralded a price round in the coffee industry. Since then, there have been no further price increases for coffee at Tchibo. Coffee accounts for about half of the company's most recent sales of just under 3.3 billion euros. The other half is generated by the sale of a changing assortment of consumer goods (non-food) in the company's own stores, in online retail, but above all in around 24,000 so-called depots in grocery stores such as Edeka, Rewe or Kaufland.

In the non-food business, Tchibo apparently has considerable problems. Similar to other retailers, a lot of shopping was done during Corona, on the one hand to be prepared for the various delivery delays at the time, but also because of the high demand. When, as a result of the gas crisis last summer, inflation rose very quickly and at the same time the desire to consume declined sharply, Tchibo increasingly stuck to clothing and cooking utensils, fitness equipment or gardening supplies and had to sell them at a discount.

The holding company Maxingvest of the Herz family, to which Tchibo belongs, warned in August that against this backdrop, Tchibo expects revenue below the previous year (3.256 billion euros) with a significant decline in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). In the previous year, the EBIT margin had improved from 2.9 to 5.4 percent. Maxingvest will not report in more detail on how the business has actually developed until August.

The workforce received clear signals weeks ago – because the usual salary increase is not available this year. Die Welt quotes from a letter to employees, according to which 2022 was "the financially worst year in the company's almost 75-year history". The suspension of the salary round applies "to the directors as well as to all other employees." However, the tax-free inflation compensation is paid in the amount of 1500 euros.

Meanwhile, the company is working on a new strategy – because not only costs are responsible for the crisis, but also the change in purchasing behavior during and after the pandemic. Tchibo still has 550 stores in Germany (900 across Europe), but in the changing retail landscape, the operation of the stores is becoming increasingly unprofitable.

Hamid Dastmalchian, who took over his new post as managing director of the non-food division a few days ago, has an important role to play in the reorganization of the business. He started his Tchibo career in this division 17 years ago. Prior to this, the industrial engineer had gained experience at Otto, Sport Scheck and Baur since the mid-1990s. The chairman of the management board is the 68-year-old former Ikea manager Werner Weber, who moved from the supervisory board to the top of Tchibo GmbH two years ago.