WaMu moving jobs to lower-cost places

In a push to lower costs, Washington Mutual is moving more jobs to foreign countries and places like Texas, where it costs less to do business.

The company told about 1,000 call-center workers in Chatsworth, Calif., on Wednesday that their jobs are headed to San Antonio and Costa Rica.

WaMu also plans to add about 4,400 jobs in foreign countries during the next couple years, Chief Executive Kerry Killinger told analysts Wednesday.

Currently, about 1,600 people work for WaMu through vendors in Canada, India and the Philippines.

The Seattle area can rest easy for now. Killinger figures the Seattle-based company will maintain or increase the number of local workers — it employs more than 7,700 in King County — and there are no plans to move call-center or other operations jobs from here.

The decision to send more jobs overseas worries people like Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, which organizes high-tech workers in the U.S.

"Between high-tech and financial services outsourcing jobs overseas, white-collar workers in Seattle will really start seeing that the global economy is not about a race to the top in wages and living standards, but a race to the bottom led by Washington Mutual, a hometown company," Courtney said.

WaMu's push for cheaper work is driven by its desire to reduce its cost of doing business from about 61 cents for every dollar of revenue to about 45 cents over the next few years.

WaMu's profit rose 29 percent to $865 million for the fourth quarter, but its 85 cents-a-share profit missed Wall Street expectations by 5 cents.

Shares dropped 90 cents to $43.50 in after-hours trading Wednesday. The quarterly figures were released after the stock market closed.

For the year, WaMu's profit rose 19 percent to $3.43 billion, reflecting improvements put in place after serious stumbles in the mortgage area during 2004.

Like most banks and thrifts, WaMu's net interest margin, which is similar to a bank's profit margin, was squeezed by rising short-term interest rates. Its net interest margin for 2005 fell 0.15 percentage points to 2.67 percent.

But it was not hurt as badly by rising short-term rates as some companies.

Indeed, the net interest margin rose slightly in the fourth quarter, largely because WaMu bought credit-card company Providian in October.

Credit-card loans often carry higher interest rates than home and other loans.

"The diversification of our business model is paying off now," Killinger said.

"The latest quarter was very difficult for the mortgage-lending business," he said. "Despite that, the growth of the retail bank and the credit-card and multifamily-lending businesses counterbalanced it, so we still had a good, solid fourth quarter."

Unlike the results of many financial institutions with credit-card operations, WaMu's fourth quarter was not damaged by a nationwide spike in bankruptcy filings as consumers rushed to file before a stricter federal bankruptcy law took effect in October.

WaMu acquired San Francisco-based Providian at the beginning of the fourth quarter.

WaMu opened 95 new branches during the fourth quarter and 210 for the year, bringing its total branches at year-end to 2,140.

Branches are part of WaMu's retail banking and financial-services group, which contributed $2.47 billion to the company's 2005 profit. The home-loans group earned $742 million in 2005, and the commercial group contributed $750 million.

In the fourth quarter, the new credit-card business brought in $166 million.

Melissa Allison: 206-464-3312 or mallison@seattletimes.com