Cisco said to be cutting as many as 10000 jobs in upcoming mass layoff

Cisco Systems, the largest networking-equipment company, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14% of its workforce, according to two people familiar with the plans. The cuts include as many as 7,000 jobs that would be eliminated by the end of Aug 2011, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't final. Cisco CEO John Chambers is slashing jobs and exiting less-profitable businesses as competitors such as Juniper Networks and HP take market share in Cisco's main businesses with lower-priced, simpler products.

Cisco said in May 2011 that it shuttered the Flip video-camera unit and cut 550 jobs. The company may eliminate more positions in the consumer-product unit, which makes Linksys home-networking equipment. Sales of Cisco's switches and routers, which made up more than half of revenue last year, will continue to slip, said Brian Marshall, an analyst at Gleacher & Co. Cisco stock had dropped 24% so far in 2011, while the S&P500 index had risen 4.9%.

- It would be quite a waste to see anything happen to the Linksys division, which used to be a standalone company in its own right until Cisco acquired them. So far all the home routers I have used have been Linksys products, from the wired BEF-SR41 to the Linux-based WRT54GL and now the Cisco Linksys E3000 wireless router, and they have all been reliable and served well over the years.

On the enterprise front, however, what I have heard from colleagues back at the office have not been as favorable in recent times, with some of them talking about the high cost and complexity especially of the newer Cisco switches and routers. In addition, as Cisco tried to integrate security features such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems into their products, I have actually been advised to specify other models from say Juniper instead, as their combo appliances are supposed to be actually cheaper and better. With the increasing level of maturity in this technology sector, the next frontier is inevitably pricing and this is where we might be looking directly at the impact of that.

Lloyds Banking to cut 15000 jobs, to focus on UK

bloomberg.com :

Lloyds Banking Group, Britain's biggest mortgage lender, will cut 15,000 jobs and reduce costs by an additional 1.5 billion pounds ($2.4 billion) as it withdraws from overseas units and increases its UK focus. Most of the job losses will come in the UK as a result of cuts to management functions and centralizing some roles. The bank also plans to withdraw from more than 15 of its 30 overseas units. British banks, including Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays are reviewing their operations and trimming profitability targets as regulators enforce higher capital requirements to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Lloyds had already pledged 2 billion pounds of savings annually following its purchase of HBOS 3 years ago, which has so far resulted in about 27,000 job losses. Lloyds has a total of 104,000 employees with about 4,000 outside the UK. HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, had said it would cut 700 posts.

- It looks like what could be another wave of mass layoffs starting up again just as the world thought that the 2008 financial meltdown was over. With the economy supposedly in a recovery and the stock market seeming to have picked up right where it left off since 2009, the next thing is to look at the jobs front, and there things seemed to be easing for a short while before reversing course again.

But if you were to look at let's say the S&P500, you would note that the stock market has been in a consolidation pattern since the 1344 level back in Feb 2011. The SPX has been unable to make a convincing run for the 1400 level since then. Although it has not been an outright crash so far, we could suppose that the 6-month lag time also applies, which is why we might be looking at some consolidation on the jobs front in recent weeks.

(2011-07-12 20:21:21 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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