US-based internet service provider AOL says it will shut down its four German offices in Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt and Duesseldorf.

The company is also set to shut down its operations in several other European countries, including Sweden and Spain.

The move is part of a plan to trim its global workforce by a third.

The closures are to affect 140 AOL employees in Germany but users will still be able to access e-mail and other services on the internet.

"German clients will remain customers of our international services," company spokesman Thomas Knorpp said on Monday.

From dot-com boom to bust

AOL had merged with Time Warner in 2001 at the height of the dot-com boom but has failed to meet expectations since then. In 2003, Time Warner dropped AOL from the group's corporate logo and in 2009 AOL was spun off as a separate company.

In November, the company announced it was to launch a restructuring program after regaining independence, to save around $300 million (200 million euros) with the plan.

A voluntary departure program, however, failed to meet the target of cutting 2,500 out of 6,900 jobs worldwide. Meetings with employees across Europe are to begin in the course of the week, while the first US employees to be laid off are to be notified in the next days.

AOL is currently the No. 4 gateway to the internet after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, while its dial-up internet acess business has increasingly been replaced by faster broadband internet services.


ai/AFP/ap/dpa
Editor: Chuck Penfold