PARIS (Bloomberg) — PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe's second-largest carmaker, will shed 4,800 jobs in France this year by offering incentives to workers who agree to quit.The planned cuts will be presented to a works council meeting on May 9, the company said yesterday in an e-mailed statement, without detailing the incentives.

"This plan will enable us to avoid a redundancy program with compulsory lay-offs," human resources director Jean-Luc Vergne said in the statement.

Peugeot is seeking to reduce costs and improve quality to keep up with competitors including Toyota Motor Corp., the company's new chief executive officer, Christian Streiff, said soon after his appointment was confirmed in February. Asian carmakers have gained European market share with new models.

The cuts, affecting 3.9 percent of Peugeot's 122,000 French employees, or 2.3 percent of the global workforce, come less than a week after the company denied a report that it planned to drop a total of 10,000 jobs, the same number that it shed across Europe last year.

All of the job cuts announced yesterday will be made in France, under the terms of an agreement signed with five of the company's six French unions on April 6, spokesman Hugues Dufour said in a telephone interview.

The agreement provides for financial payments to workers who leave to take jobs with other employers, start their own businesses or retire early. Dufour declined to say how much workers would be offered or what the overall cost to Peugeot would be.

Peugeot was expected to say that first-quarter sales rose 2.7 percent to [EURO]14.3 billion ($19.5 billion), according to the median estimate of five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Shares of Peugeot rose as much as 75 cents, or 1.3 percent, to 59.3 euros and were 0.1 percent higher at 5.07 p.m. in Paris.