In an announcement made earlier today, Cirque du Soleil is slashing a number of positions, mostly at its Montreal headquarters, citing tough economic times and out of control expenses. Here are some highlights from the announcement:
- “The Cirque is going through a difficult period but not a difficult financial period,” spokeswoman Renée-Claude Ménard said Wednesday at the company’s Montreal headquarters.
- “We are now in the process of reviewing within the company worldwide, all of our expenses, to ensure we decrease them significantly,” said Renée-Claude Ménard.
- “We’ve identified 400 positions [to be cut], the majority are in the Montreal operations, but we don’t have a definite number yet,” she said. (About 50 positions were abolished before the holidays; 30 in Montreal alone).
- The first round of layoffs will happen before the end of January and will run through March.
- Cirque employs about 5,000 people world-wide, 2,000 of those are in Montreal. The cuts represent 9 percent of the company’s total workforce.
- Owner Guy Laliberté was not on hand for the announcement, company representatives said he was breaking the news to staff at the same time. And despite the restructuring, Laliberté has no intention of selling the company.
- “The first thing to say is that the Circus is not in crisis,” Menard told a news conference Wednesday. “Let’s get that straight. We had a record year in terms of tickets sold. We sold more than 14 million tickets this year. We had a record year for total revenue, with more than $1-billion.” Despite that, the Cirque didn’t make money, Menard said.
- Most of the Cirque’s revenue comes from outside the Country – and Ménard said for every cent the Canadian dollar increases, it costs the company $3 million is lost revenue.
- The first sign things were changing, Ménard admitted, was back in 2008. The company started to see expenses increase sharply, and as the Canadian dollar inched higher, revenues decreased. “Basically, we’re very lucky that within a very difficult financial and economic situation worldwide – that we’re still pulling the rabbit out of the hat,” she said.
- It’s a problem, she admits, the company has avoided facing for several years, but it now has no choice. “And now, at 29-years-old, Cirque has to be mature and look at it [as] a mature company.”
- In addition to the layoffs, Cirque said it would be closing four shows to trim expenses. “We would have been much happier to tell you those shows weren’t closing,” Ms. Ménard said. “But it’s not a revenue issue, it’s an expense issue.”
