Pakistan’s Biggest Telecom Merger Turns Painful: e& Set to Cut Nearly 500 Jobs

Corporate mergers are announced with press releases about synergies, efficiency, and growth. The version employees experience is different; it begins with assessments, interviews for your own job, and the quiet calculation of who is needed and who is not. That phase has arrived at Pakistan’s newly merged telecom entity, and it is moving fast.

The Restructuring Has Already Begun

Sources with direct knowledge of the integration process confirm that workforce rationalization at the merged Telenor-Ufone entity, now operating under the e& brand, has already started and is expected to be completed within the next few weeks. The process follows the Islamabad High Court’s recent approval of the merger of Telenor Pakistan into Pak Telecom Mobile Limited, which legally dissolved Telenor Pakistan as a separate entity and vested all its assets, liabilities, and obligations in PTML.

The restructuring is being driven by a straightforward reality of mergers: when two companies combine, they arrive with two of everything. Two sales teams. Two marketing departments. Two finance functions. Two HR divisions. Two technology organizations. Two customer service operations. Two administrative structures. The merged entity does not need two of anything, and the process of determining which roles survive, which are consolidated, and which are eliminated is now underway across all of these departments.

The Scale: Nearly 500 Jobs at Risk

Before the merger, Telenor Pakistan employed approximately 800 people. Around 300 employees from Ufone have already been transferred to the company’s headquarters at the 345 facility, with more transfers expected as integration progresses. The combined workforce substantially exceeds what a single, efficiently operated mobile operator of this scale requires.

Sources estimate that the total employee strength could be reduced by nearly 500, bringing the merged entity’s headcount closer to the staffing level of Jazz, Pakistan’s largest mobile operator, which currently employs around 1,100 people. Jazz itself was formed through the merger of Warid Telecom and Mobilink, giving it comparable experience of post-merger rationalization and providing an instructive reference point for what the e& Pakistan integration is likely to look like at the end of its restructuring phase.

Compensation: A Harsher Reality Than Previous Mergers

The financial terms being offered to departing employees represent a significant departure from the precedent set by earlier Pakistani telecom consolidations. Sources say the compensation under consideration is limited to a few months’ salary, a notably different outcome from the generous Voluntary Separation Scheme packages that characterized the Warid-Mobilink merger that created Jazz, where affected employees received substantially more favourable settlements.

The contrast matters beyond the individual cases involved. VSS packages from the Jazz merger set an informal industry benchmark for how departing employees could expect to be treated during a major telecom consolidation. If e& Pakistan’s restructuring delivers significantly less, it will establish a new and considerably lower benchmark for future consolidations in the sector, at a time when Pakistan’s telecom industry may be entering a sustained period of consolidation driven by the capital demands of 5G infrastructure.

Employees across both legacy organizations have described growing uncertainty over job security as the integration accelerates. Many expect the restructuring to continue through the coming weeks as the company works to eliminate overlapping positions, reduce costs, and establish the operational efficiency that justifies the merger’s strategic rationale.

The Official Response

When contacted for comment, Saad Mustafa Waraich, Director of Corporate Communications at the merged PTML entity, offered a carefully worded response:

At this stage of a newly amalgamated organization, our focus remains on integration, establishing operating structures, governance, and policies. With that priority, we cannot comment on speculation related to internal plans.”

The response neither confirms nor denies the restructuring. It is the kind of statement that organizations in the middle of sensitive workforce processes typically issue, acknowledging the moment without providing the specificity that would either reassure affected employees or confirm sources’ accounts. The phrase “establishing operating structures” is, in its own way, a description of exactly what sources are describing: a process of determining what the merged organization looks like and how many people it needs.

What This Means for Pakistan’s Telecom Sector

The e& Pakistan restructuring is the most visible human consequence of a merger that was framed almost entirely in strategic and competitive terms when it was announced. The combined entity will control approximately 36 percent of Pakistan’s mobile market, near parity with Jazz’s 36.42 percent. It will bring together combined spectrum holdings that improve the economics of 5G network deployment. It will create operational efficiencies that improve the group’s financial position.

All of that is real. So is this: several hundred people who built careers at Telenor Pakistan or Ufone are being evaluated for redundancy in a process that offers significantly less compensation than the industry precedent they might reasonably have expected.

Pakistan’s broader employment market in the technology and telecom sector is absorbing this at a moment when the sector itself is under financial pressure; high taxation, infrastructure theft, load shedding costs, and the capital demands of 5G investment are all compressing margins across the industry. The jobs being lost at e& Pakistan will not be easy to replace in a market under these conditions.

The Bottom Line

Every major corporate merger has two stories: the one told in boardrooms and regulatory filings, and the one lived by the people whose roles are eliminated to make the numbers work. Pakistan’s biggest telecom merger is now generating both simultaneously. The IHC approval, the e& rebranding, and the 5G ambitions are the first story. The 500 jobs at risk, the below-industry compensation terms, and the employees sitting through assessments to compete for their own positions are the second. Both are real, and both define what this consolidation actually means for Pakistan’s telecom landscape, not just for its competitive structure but also for the people who built the two networks that are now becoming one.