Centrica to shed staff, assets to focus on supply, services

* Looks to raise up to 1 bln stg from assets sales

* To cut net headcount by 4,000

* Cuts dividend by 30 pct (Adds CEO comments, details, updates throughout)

By Susanna Twidale and Karolin Schaps

LONDON, July 30 (Reuters) - Centrica (LSE: CNA.L - news) will cut around 10 percent of its workforce and sell up to 1 billion pounds ($1.56 billion) worth of upstream and wind assets by 2017 as Britain's largest utility looks to focus on energy supply and services.

The company will shed 6,000 jobs from its nearly 37,500 staff but expects to create 2,000 jobs in new business areas. It did not specify where the cuts would come said half of the job losses would be redundancies.

Cost-cuts are expected to save around 750 million pounds a year by 2020, it said.

Many European utilities are having to make savings and look for new ways to drive profits as their decades-old model of centralised, predictable energy production and consumption comes up against falling power prices and reduced consumption while subsides for renewable power are being slashed.

"Central generation in the OECD is experiencing something of a market failure," new chief executive, former BP man Iain Conn said during a press briefing.

The owner of energy supplier British Gas reported a three percent fall in first-half adjusted operating profit to 1 billion pounds on Thursday, meeting expectations.

In an effort to turn the tide, Centrica also announced plans to ramp up services such as helping large businesses with energy saving measures.

Conn said the North Sea would remain the focus of Centrica's upstream operations but signalled that it no longer sees its Canadian operations as core to the business and reiterated plans to sell upstream assets in Trinidad and Tobago.

Centrica owns a number of producing assets in Canada, most notably a 60 percent stake in gas fields in Alberta which it bought in 2013 for C$1 billion ($771 million).

The fall in oil and gas prices in North America has meant many investors are shedding assets in this industry, potentially making it tougher for Centrica to sell its stake in onshore Canadian gas fields.

Centrica will also invest 250 million pounds over the next five years to expand its North American retail business. Some analysts had expected the company to consider selling parts of that business.

The wind operations to be sold were not material to the business but Conn said uncertainty over government support for renewables had increased the risks involved in the projects.

Britain's government last week announced a slew of changes in its renewable subsidies which it said were needed to rein in the spiralling costs.

The company's nuclear assets, a 20 percent stake in EDF (Hanover: E2F.HA - news) Energy, the British subsidiary of France's EDF (Paris: FR0010242511 - news) , will be retained.

The group reduced its interim dividend by 30 percent to 3.57 pence, as announced earlier.

Analysts were broadly positive about the planned changes for the company.

"Centrica's management have at least now given shareholders a plausible business plan that offers a chance that the business can survive," said Peter Atherton, a utility analyst at investment bank Jefferies.

Shares (Berlin: DI6.BE - news) were down 2.3 percent at 269 pence at 1107 GMT.

($1 = 0.6406 pounds)

($1 = 1.2970 Canadian dollars) (Editing by Jon Boyle, Jason Neely and Jane Merriman)