EDF to cut 6 percent of French power generation jobs by 2019

PARIS (Reuters) - France's EDF (EDF.PA) plans to cut around 6 percent of jobs at its French power generation unit between 2017-2019, equivalent to more than 4,000 positions, as part of a broader restructuring at the state-controlled utility, it said on Thursday.

EDF said there would be no redundancies as the firm would be encouraging staff to leave on a voluntary basis, and added it also planned to hire 2,500 staff between 2017-2018.

It did not give the exact number of job losses in its statement, but an EDF spokeswoman said that at the end of 2016, the generation unit - EDF SA - employed 68,464 people. This means a six percent reduction would amount to about 4,110 job cuts.

In January 2016, EDF had said it planned to cut 5 percent of EDF SA staff without redundancies over three years.

At the end of 2015, EDF SA employed 71,580, the spokeswoman said. That suggests most of that reduction was achieved last year.

The job cuts do not affect EDF's grid units RTE and Enedis, its renewable energy unit EDF Energies Nouvelles or its energy services unit Dalkia.

At the end of 2015 - numbers for the entire group at the end of 2016 are not yet available - EDF employed 159,112 people worldwide, including 133,406 in France, the spokeswoman said.

(Reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Geert De Clercq; Editing by Michel Rose and Mark Potter)