Mubasher: UK aircraft engine manufacturer Rolls Royce said it would lay off 4,600 employees, in the latest move to reduce costs on the back of pressures from investors to boost competitiveness.

The cuts will take place over the next 24 months, reducing 10% of the workforce and targeting the duplication in administration, management and corporate.

This came in an attempt to reach annual savings of GBP 400 million ($530.56 million) by 2020, the UK engineering giant announced on Thursday, adding that it would incur GBP 500 million ($663.15 million) in costs associated with job cuts between 2018 and 2020.

Moreover, two thirds of the staff reduction would fall in the UK, while the cuts will not affect Rolls Royce’s engineers, the company said.

“We are proposing the creation of a much more streamlined organization. We have to significantly reduce the size of our corporate centre, removing complexity and duplication that makes us too slow, uncompetitive and too expensive,” Rolls Royce’s CEO Warren East told reporters.

 In addition, East, who have overhauled Rolls Royce since he took charge in 2015 to improve the company’s profitability, said that the job cuts is not related to the Trent 1000 engine issue.

The announcement came as the Westhampnett-based company grapples with problems related to parts of its Trent 1000 engine powering the Boeing 787 Dreamliner long-haul jets.

This marks the largest round of job cuts since October 2001 when the company had to cut 5,000 jobs in response to aviation crisis following the 9/11 attacks in the US.