Nestle, the Swiss food giant whose brands include Nespresso coffee and Perrier water, will eliminate 16,000 jobs worldwide over the next two years, its new chief executive said on Thursday.

“The world is changing, and Nestle needs to change faster,” Philipp Navratil, who took the reins of the multinational in early September, said in a statement.

That included making “hard but necessary decisions to reduce headcount”, he said.

Navratil spoke as the company published nine-month figures showing sales down by 1.9 percent to 65.9 billion Swiss francs ($83 billion).

The layoffs include 12,000 white-collar jobs, saving the company one billion Swiss francs — which it said was double what had been previously planned — on top of 4,000 job cuts already underway in production and the supply chain

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