UBS trims investment banking unit

Zurich/New : UBS AG on Friday said it is cutting another 2,000 jobs at its troubled investment bank and closing most of its commodities business but will remain a universal bank and will not quit investment banking completely.

The news comes just a day after the world's big-gest wealth manager said it made a small profit in the third quarter after a year of losses, suggesting it had started to turn the corner even as the credit crisis engulfs other banks.

The 2,000 job losses come on top of 4,100 investment banking positions cut in the past year. Forays by the investment bank into risky assets like US subprime mortgages have forced UBS to write down $42 billion - the most of any bank in Europe.

The cuts mean UBS will have reduced its investment banking workforce by about a quarter to 17,000 since peaking in the third quarter of 2007, while the bank will have cut its total headcount by more than 10 per cent to under 80,000.

Redundancies

A spokeswoman said the cuts would mostly fall in the US and Britain, where they would be carried out "swiftly" and mostly through redundancies, with a target completion date of the year end. Some jobs will also go in Asia and Switzerland.

The latest move comes a week after HSBC announced 1,100 investment banking job cuts and follows tens of thousands of job losses across the global financial industry, which is in its worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Jerker Johansson, chief executive of UBS's investment bank, said UBS was determined not to sell the business, which he said he was positioning to make a profit in 2009 despite the worsening industry outlook.