British Telecom is to make an additional 15,000 redundancies, most of them in the UK, after reporting an annual loss of £134m this morning.

The telecoms giant said it had already cut 15,000 jobs in the past year, 5,000 more than expected, and that the additional redundancies were due to the poor performance of its BT Global Services business. The division of the company handles corporate IT systems for large firms and BT said the unit had had to write down nearly £1.6bn in losses in the past year.

“Three out of four of BT’s lines of business have performed well in spite of fierce competition and the global economic downturn,” said BT chief executive Ian Livingston.

“However this achievement has been overshadowed by the unacceptable performance of BT Global Services and the resulting charges we have taken.”

The latest redundancies amount to 10 per cent of BT’s entire workforce.

BT said it hoped to make most of the redundancies voluntary, while the reduction in staffing numbers would also be helped through retirements and “natural wastage”. I claimed to have no plans for compulsory redundancies.

“Our aim is to work closely with the unions to reduce BT’s total labour cost, of both direct and indirect staff, as this is critical to the success of the company going forward,” said a BT spokesman.

BT added that it would make £525m of pension contributions in each of the next three years to help cut the scheme’s deficit.

It also cut its dividend sharply from 15.8 pence to 6.5p. The stock market gave a mixed reaction to the news with shares in BT falling sharply at 8am this morning before recovering to near to yesterday’s closing price of 94p a share.