UBS pares investment banking, to cut 2,000 jobs

By Emma Thomasson and Joseph A. Giannone

ZURICH/NEW YORK (Reuters) - UBS AG said it is cutting another 2,000 jobs at its troubled investment bank and closing most of its commodities business but will remain a universal bank and will not quit investment banking completely.

The news on Friday comes just a day after the world's biggest wealth manager said it made a small profit in the third quarter after a year of losses, suggesting it had started to turn the corner even as the credit crisis engulfs other banks.

The 2,000 job losses come on top of 4,100 investment banking positions cut in the past year. Forays by the investment bank into risky assets like U.S. subprime mortgages have forced UBS to write down $42 billion -- the most of any bank in Europe.

A spokeswoman said the cuts would mostly fall in the United States and Britain, where they would be carried out "swiftly" and mostly through redundancies, with a target completion date of the year end. Some jobs will also go in Asia and Switzerland.

The cuts mean UBS will have reduced its investment banking workforce by about a quarter to 17,000 since peaking in the third quarter of 2007, while the bank will have cut its total headcount by more than 10 percent to under 80,000.

The latest move comes a week after HSBC announced 1,100 investment banking job cuts and follow tens of thousands of job losses across the global financial industry, which is in its worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Jerker Johansson, chief executive of UBS's investment bank, told Reuters in an interview that UBS was determined not to sell the business, which he said he was positioning to make a profit in 2009 despite the worsening industry outlook.

UBS's shares extended gains after the comments and were up 6.6 percent at 22.70 Swiss francs at 9:02 a.m. EDT, when the DJ Stoxx European banking sector index was up 3.4 percent. UBS had already rallied on Thursday's news of a quarterly profit.

However, the stock is still down two thirds from a year ago, when it reported its first loss in nine years. It tumbled to 15.18 francs on September 16, its lowest level since listing in its current form in 1998, after Lehman Brothers collapsed.

"The revenue base in the investment bank is probably falling just as fast as the cost base given market conditions. We doubt that these cuts will be the last," said Helvea's Peter Thorne.

"REDRAWN LANDSCAPE"

Chairman Peter Kurer launched a radical turnaround plan in August that involved separating UBS's investment bank from its prized wealth management business and asset management, stoking speculation that it might seek to sell investment banking.

But Johansson said a combination of an investment bank with a deposit base was the right model now.

"I believe the benefits of being a group, especially in these turbulent markets, are substantial," Johansson said.

UBS has reduced its exposure to the most troubled assets by well over 50 percent this year, he said, although he cannot promise writedowns are over. Analysts expect new writedowns of 3 billion Swiss francs ($2.65 billion) when UBS reports on November 4.