The Canadian company could lose up to 600 employees worldwide, despite their massive Las Vegas shows

Cirque du Soleil could lay off up to 600 employees worldwide, according to reports in the Toronto Star.

The circus behemoth, which has had two shows in the UK in the past six months – one of which, Kooza, is currently playing at London's Royal Albert Hall – employs 5,000 people in its worldwide operations, of whom 2,000 are based in Montreal. Details are expected to be announced after a staff meeting on 16 January.

However, after "a disastrous 18-month period" which saw four of its long-running productions close and box-office losses on its $30m film Worlds Away, the company is reportedly set to make more than a 10th of its workforce redundant. The move comes weeks after a number of public relations staff were laid off in December.

Cirque du Soleil's director of public relations Renée-Claude Ménard stopped short of confirming job losses, but told the Montreal Gazette, "Cirque is currently reviewing all its operations to ensure viable and controlled costs. We have adjusted our production schedules and are operating close to 20 shows worldwide. Now we are adapting our workflow to this new reality."

However, with annual revenue still standing at around $1bn Canadian, Ménard clarified elsewhere, "we are not closing our doors just yet, we just want to keep creating."

Cirque du Soleil has seen a huge amount of expansion in the past decade. In 2002, its global workforce totalled 2,400, with total revenue around half the current figure. At the time, company president Daniel Lamarre predicted that the company would expand at a rate of 25% a year for five years and recently described the decade as having brought "explosive growth".

Among its 19 productions globally, the company has three long-running shows in Las Vegas, all of which are still playing to capacity audiences, with Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour expected to join them later this year.

However, their regular London outings in the past few years have met with a muted and increasingly sceptical response from critics. Earlier this month, the Guardian's theatre critic Lyn Gardner described Kooza as "impressive, but almost entirely soulless".