By Ko Terada

Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

Panasonic Holdings Corp. announced Wednesday that the number of employees who have applied for early retirement has expanded to about 12,000, more than the planned 10,000 workforce reduction announced last May.

"It would be untrue to say there is no disruption," said Group CFO Akira Waniko at a briefing, adding that the company aims to restructure operations.

The following is taken from a question and answer session at the briefing.

Question: How are your structural reform efforts progressing?

Akira Waniko: The scale of (workforce) reduction has grown larger than initially anticipated, likely to expand to around 12,000 people. It's painful, but we want to support those embarking on new paths. It would be untrue to say there's no disruption with many people leaving, but we want to view this positively and move forward by uniting (the Panasonic group) as a whole.

Question: How will you improve productivity after the workforce reduction?

Waniko: We don't intend to simply add new people to slimmed down workplaces. We're discussing how much productivity we can boost using AI and other means. Including through restructured operations, we aim to maintain a lean structure so that we can avoid going backward.

Question: Regarding the workforce reduction, have you reached the finalizing stage?

Waniko: We don't anticipate the number increasing further.

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This article is from The Yomiuri Shimbun. Neither Dow Jones Newswires, MarketWatch, Barron's nor The Wall Street Journal were involved in the creation of this content.

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February 05, 2026 04:48 ET (09:48 GMT)

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