Dutch beer brewer Heineken announced on Wednesday (February 11) its plan to reduce its workforce by 7% over the next two years, approximately 5,000 to 6,000 employees. The company also aims to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance productivity in response to weak sales, striving to achieve a 2% to 6% growth in operating profit this year.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Heineken has 87,000 employees and operates in more than seventy countries, making it the world’s second-largest beer brewer.
The company’s performance for the quarter was flat, with a projected total sales volume decrease of 2.4% in 2025. However, the adjusted operating profit showed a growth of 4.4%.
Heineken’s stock price has recently risen by 3.4%, accumulating a nearly 7% increase so far this year.
CEO Dolf van den Brink mentioned on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” program on Wednesday that the decline in performance was due to the “challenging market environment.” However, overall, the company’s performance remains relatively balanced.
Van den Brink stated, “Improving productivity has always been the top priority of the EverGreen 2030 Strategy. We commit to saving 400 to 500 million euros annually, hence the need to fulfill this debt commitment.”
He emphasized that the layoffs will facilitate investments in growth and their premium brands. The job cuts are partly due to the utilization of AI or digitalization.
He highlighted, “Approximately 3,000 positions will be transitioned to our business services sector as a key element of the EverGreen 2030 Strategy, where technology digitalization and AI will be crucial in continuously enhancing productivity.”
Over the past year, AI-induced layoffs have been a hot topic in the news and are expected to remain a focus of global business leaders in 2026.
According to the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ December data, AI-led job cuts in the US are expected to reach close to 55,000 by 2025.
Amazon announced layoffs of 14,000 employees last year; at the end of January 2026, they revealed additional job cuts of around 16,000 as part of their corporate restructuring. While not the sole reason, AI was mentioned internally at Amazon as a means to increase efficiency and streamline processes that require significant manual labor, potentially leading to the replacement or redesign of certain functional or repetitive roles by technology.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff disclosed laying off 4,000 customer management personnel, reportedly due to AI handling 50% of the company’s tasks.
European companies like Lufthansa, Accenture, and others have also discussed the efficiency brought by AI in their workforce reduction initiatives.
During the World Economic Forum (WEF) last month, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva described AI as “impacting the labor market like a tsunami.”
(This article references CNBC’s report)