Santomassimo said $100-200m in charges on the Q3 call in October. They took a ~$140m hit on severance charges a year ago when 2,200 were let go. Back of the envelope math works out to about $64k per person or 6 months of severance + benefits. Per their earnings release, BK has a $5.9B annual run rate on staff cost at 48,700 employees at the end of 3Q19, works out to $121k per person annually. It's not 4-5k like some posted but a 3-6% cut is still pretty big considering how shorthanded this place is already.
For some clues on where the axe will fall, here is a quote from Gibbons on the Q3 call:
"...continue to see significant opportunity to automate a lot more things like reconciliations. When we look at the accounting platforms and the NAV calculations, there are still many manual processes in there that we are targeting, so I kind of look at – and there are still you know locations that we can – that we need to manage where there's an opportunity.
And as we look out to 2020 and some of the things that we can accelerate, I'll call out you know a couple of items. Number one, I think around reconciliations we can increase the scalability of the plant. We've actually been applying machine learning and creating much much more automated reconciliation process. It doesn't seem like a lot, but if you think about what we do as a company, it is a massive undertaking with a huge amount of headcount dedicated to it.
We’re also investing in a client inquiry system where we’ll digitize all of the clients’ inquiries into us. That doesn't sound like a lot either, but if you can imagine the millions of transactions that we process. If we can automate how we capture inquiries around it, we're also automating our instruction capture and as I mentioned earlier,"