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Washington: Europe's biggest bank by market value HSBC is gearing up for thousands more job cuts, according to a report.

The job cuts target has still to be fixed, but people close to the bank suggested up to 5,000 staff could go as part of the one billion dollars savings plan.

If HSBC maintained the recent rate of staff cuts to cost savings, the number would be closer to 10,000, CNN reports.

According to the report, Stuart Gulliver, HSBC's chief executive, said when he announced annual results last week that he would "fixate on costs" over the coming year and promised to find a further one billion dollars of annual savings in 2013.

Gulliver has spent the past two years trying to streamline HSBC's global network of fiefdoms, both in order to impose more control from head office in London and to strip out overlaps and inefficiencies.

HSBC has already exceeded its target of finding 2.5-3.5 billion dollars of cost savings by 2013, announcing 3.6 billion dollars of "sustainable annual savings" with its 2012 results, the report said.

But the bank remains as far as ever from a related target, to cut the bank's elevated cost-income ratio to between 48 and 52 percent, the report added.

ANI

First Published: Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 10:05