Alpine to exit eastern Europe

Alpine, the struggling Austrian unit of Spanish construction group FCC, is to slash about a third of its workforce and withdraw from eastern Europe, its new restructuring chief said.

The company, which is being squeezed as government austerity programmes put construction plans on hold, has until the end of February to come up with a revamp plan that will convince its banks to keep its credit and guarantee lines open, Reuters reports.

Josef Schultheis, brought in two weeks ago to oversee Alpine's restructuring, told Austria's Salzburger Nachrichten he could achieve this "if everyone helps - banks and the owners, but equally customers, suppliers and the staff".

In comments published by the newspaper on Friday, he said the number of Alpine's staff would drop to 9,000-10,000 from 15,000 currently, and its sales would fall to around 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) from 3.5 billion euros.

Schultheis said Alpine would in the future concentrate on its profitable core markets of Austria and other German-speaking countries and would withdraw from Scandinavia, Asia and possibly the Czech Republic as soon as possible and certainly by 2014.

Alpine's banks, which include Erste Bank and Unicredit Bank Austria have agreed not to terminate loans worth 600 million euros until late February and will provide bridge financing in the double-digit millions of euros.

Alpine's chief executive quit in October after the company issued a profit warning. It later said its internal accounts showed a loss of 89 million euros for the third quarter.

FCC, which is suffering from weakness in its home market of Spain, which is in its second recession in three years, scrapped its dividend on Thursday.