Hastings Deering jobs going in August

Mining services company Hastings Deering now says it will be retrenching about 400 staff in August.

The Brisbane-based company had earlier announced that redundancies would be finalised by the end of Thursday.

But it released a revised statement on Thursday afternoon, indicating lay-offs would take place in the coming month.

"It is anticipated that this will result in approximately 400 redundancies across Hastings Deering's business which will occur in August," it said.

Challenging market conditions were blamed for the lay-offs, after a series of efficiency and productivity changes during the past year.

Hastings Deering is one of the largest Caterpillar machinery dealers in the world and employs nearly 5000 people, with branches across regional Queensland, Northern Territory, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.

Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union official Brad Hansen said he was engaged in talks to save jobs and work out where the cuts would occur.

"We are concerned about the number of redundancies and we are trying to work with the company to redeploy staff wherever it's possible to save a job," he said.

The speed of the retrenchments was not a surprise to him, considering the company had behaved in a similar way in June last year, when about 200 workers were immediately retrenched.