DELAWARE (From The News Journal) -- DuPont Co. employees who still have jobs with the chemical giant will not be getting much in the way of added compensation this year.

DuPont on Wednesday confirmed it has eliminated merit raises this year and plans to rein in bonuses.

"These were difficult but necessary decisions," DuPont spokesman Dan Turner said in a released statement. "DuPont is a performance-based culture and our merit pay and short-term incentive compensation impact reflects that. Coming out of the fourth quarter, we are making strong progress on the priority areas we have identified to improve our performance."

This is the second consecutive year DuPont has cut bonuses and frozen employee salaries.

Former Chief Executive Ellen Kullman informed workers last January that 2014 bonuses were being cut while merit-pay increases were being frozen until the third quarter. At that time, company officials said they expected to save $175 million.

This year, merit raises are being dropped entirely, while most bonuses also are being cut, outside of any pre-negotiated labor deals.

DuPont officials declined to say how much the company expects to save from this year's pay freezes.

Employees reportedly were told about the raises and bonuses on Tuesday, just hours after DuPont reported a $253 million loss in the fourth quarter.

The Delaware-based company experienced net sales losses in all of its business units and across all regions, leading to DuPont's first quarterly loss since 2008.

CEO Ed Breen told investors and analysts that DuPont now expects to cut $730 million in costs this year through global layoffs and consolidated operations.

"This plan will further simplify our organization into fewer, larger businesses with integrated R&D, engineering and manufacturing functions," he said during a conference call.

The company previously planned about $700 million in cost-cutting this year, including a 10-percent reduction in its global workforce of about 54,000.

DuPont says those layoffs will include roughly 1,700 workers in Delaware, or about 28 percent of its workforce in the state, by the end of March.

In the short-term, those layoffs and other restructuring measures cost the company about $798 million, including $656 million spent on severance and related benefit costs.

Those layoff impacts will begin coming off DuPont's books in the second quarter of 2016 and eventually result in a savings as it pays out severance that reportedly maxes out at a full year's salary for employees who spent two decades or more with the company.

Most, if not all, of those Delaware workers reportedly have been notified of their pending job loss. Many are expected to leave the company between Feb. 29 and March 31.

The enhanced cost-cutting Breen announced this week is not expected to include any further layoffs in Delaware, according to a source familiar with the company.

Breen offered few details about the additional cost savings the company hopes to achieve this year.

Company officials on Wednesday declined to specify what additional business units would be consolidated or when.

DuPont already combined four business units into two, effective Jan. 1. The Packaging and Industrial Polymers unit was merged with the Performance Polymers business into DuPont Performance Materials. Safety Protection Technologies joined Building Innovations to become DuPont Protective Solutions.

A further consolidation of business units is expected in advance of the company's planned merger with the Dow Chemical Co. later this year.

That deal - the largest chemical company merger in history - calls for Dow and DuPont to form DowDuPont, the largest chemical company in history. The unified company then would separate into three independent businesses: agriculture and chemicals, material sciences and specialty products.

DuPont announced last month that the post-merger specialty products business will be located in Delaware, while the material sciences company is expected to be headquartered in Midland, Michigan, the corporate home of Dow Chemical.

Breen said this week that he expects to announce the future location of the post-merger agriculture business "in the next few weeks."