The Nestlé group has been present in Portugal since 1923, where it has two production units, one in Porto and the Avanca factory, where around 500 people work.
The food ‘giant’ Nestlé announced this Thursday that it plans to lay off 16,000 workers across the world over the next two years, presenting third-quarter results with a drop in sales of 1.9%, to 71 billion euros.
The company did not say in which countries this layoff of workers will occur.
The Nestlé group has been present since 1923 in Portugal, where it has two production units – one in Porto, dedicated to coffee roasting, and the Avanca factory, where around 500 people work. – and a distribution center also in this parish of Estarreja.
“The world is evolving and Nestlé has to adapt more quickly”, which means “taking difficult but necessary decisions to reduce employees”, said the president of the multinational, the Austrian-Swiss Philip Navratil, who took office at the beginning of September.
The worker reduction program includes the elimination of 12 thousand positions in various areas and functions, “allowing for a reduction in annual expenditure of one billion Swiss francs (around 1.078 billion euros) until the end of 2027”, double what was planned, according to the statement from the Swiss group.
Those 12 thousand workers are joined by another four thousand whose extinction was already underway as a way of increasing productivity in production chainsstorage and distribution.
“We are increasing our savings target to three billion Swiss francs (around 3.2 billion euros) from today,” added Navratil, when the previous target was 2.7 billion euros.
The business cluster has more than two thousand brands, including Nescafé, Maggi KitKat, among others, and experienced a busy month of September, with the departure of the then general director, the Frenchman Laurent Freixe, and the previous president, the Belgian Paul Bulcke.
In the first nine months of 2025, Nestlé’s sales growth was 3.3%, driven by price increases of 2.8%.
Navratil, who headed Nespresso until September, will try to stabilize the economic group, whose growth has slowed due to the high inflation of 2022 and a scandal in its bottled water sector.
