Razorfish continues to slash staff

US internet consultancy Razorfish is merging its London and Amsterdam offices in a bid to slash costs as the company undergoes yet more job cuts.

The merger is due to take place within the next two weeks and is expected to produce savings to counterbalance a massive drop in cash reserves from $84.1m in September last year to $51.5m in December. A further drop of between $20m and $25m is expected in the first quarter of 2001. Stephen Fletcher, currently managing director of Razorfish's Amsterdam office, which has 115 staff, will head up both offices after the merger while Colin Barlow, the current incumbent at the 160-strong London office, will become overall operations director. The main cost saving will come from the combination of back office functions including human resources and finance. A Razorfish spokesman told silicon.com: "The upper management recruitment has been difficult. For example, Amsterdam has a technical manager and London doesn't, while we have a good client services director and Amsterdam didn't. "It is efficient and we need to be efficient at the moment," he added. London is also going to be hit for a second time by job losses after 46 of its staff were made redundant at the beginning of February. A programme of voluntary redundancy has since been introduced for staff at the London, Boston and San Francisco offices. Overall the company has off-loaded 400 staff worldwide while a further 20 per cent is expected to be cut from its 1,800 employees. The spokesman was unable to comment on figures.