British defence giant BAE Systems is set to announce up to 3,000 job losses as it struggles to secure new orders for the Eurofighter Typhoon combat jet and slows deliveries to the project's existing customers amid cuts to defence budgets, British media reports said on Sunday.
The Sunday Telegraph newspaper and broadcaster Sky News said up to 3,000 workers could lose their jobs, all of them in Britain, as BAE prepares for a possible slowdown in production.
The Sunday Telegraph said the job losses could come as early as next week at two of the firm's military aircraft division plants in northern England. BAE has a 33 percent stake in the Eurofighter joint venture company alongside EADS and Finmeccanica and has received orders for some 550 planes from the four partner nations involved - the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain.
A spokeswoman for BAE said the company would not be drawn on possible job cut figures, which she said were speculative.
"As a company we haven't officially announced anything yet and our approach to this is, as and when we do, we would inform our staff first," she said. But in a statement the company, which is Britain's biggest manufacturing business, said it had informed staff it is "reviewing our operations across various businesses" to make sure it was best placed to secure future business.
It blamed a lack of fighter jet orders on depressed world markets and said a rationalisation of some parts of the business was therefore needed.