Air Products has talked more about the extra recruits it hired from 2018, principally to drive forward its hydrogen projects, several of which it has now cancelled or is looking to scale back.
Newly installed CEO Eduardo Menezes said in the company’s Q2 earnings call last week, “The company grew by almost 7,000 employees since 2018 to execute the capital plan, [and] this had a negative impact on both cost and execution quality, leading to significant project delays.”
He said the lesson from this phase was to embrace the importance of refocusing on the company’s core merchant industrial gases business.
A chart illustrated the source of the problem – a 6,700-person surge in staff numbers between 2018 and 2024, climbing to a peak of 23,000 employees globally.
Menezes’ predecessor, Seifi Ghasemi, was an ardent fan of hydrogen, launching NEOM in Saudi Arabia and repeatedly advocating its key role in driving down global emissions.
But the technical, financial, and regulatory challenges in the sector have not kept pace with the industrial major’s original ambitions. And attention has now shifted to its larger headcount.
Since 2024, 1,300 jobs have gone, in addition to 500 associated with the LNG technologies sale to Honeywell – and more will be cut in the next three years, said Menezes, with the prospect of “underperforming projects” highlighted on the call receiving more culls.
“We intend to identify another 2,500 to 3,000 positions which will be eliminated between 2026 and 2028 as we finalise the large projects, with the objective of reaching an employment level similar to,” said Menezes.
Air Products also aims to halve its capital spend to $2.5bn by 2030. Fewer projects will require fewer staff on the payroll.
Staff numbers are slated to settle at around 18,500 between 2027 and 2028.
