AMD is laying off 1,400 of it's 12,000 staff after blaming the PC industry "slump" for raising costs. The move is planned to save $200 million in costs by 2012, according to Yahoo.
At the end of Q3 2011, AMD had 12,00 staff, which means the job cuts are around a 12% deduction. The company blames slowing down PC markets for the cuts, however it's likely due to the company experiencing manufacturing faults with their next generation chips, and the resulting postponing of them.
It's not completely clear where all the workers will be fired from, but 320 of them are in Austin, TX, reports We Are Austin.
Strangely enough, shortly after the announcement PC World said that Intel has lost ground this quarter to AMD in the laptop market, with the company growing to 17.6% market share from 13.7% compared to last year. In a market like this, that growth was evidently not enough.
Among those let go, some were senior executives, such as Pat Moorhead, VP, and Product Director Carrell Killebrew.
According to a leaked memo obtained by The Verge, AMD is making the move to "rebalance [their] skillsets" and drive to a more competitive cost structure." AMD officially announced the layoffs with a press release a few hours after the news came out. We've embedded it below;
AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced a restructuring plan and implementation of operational efficiency initiatives designed to strengthen the company's competitive positioning. AMD expects that these combined actions will create a more competitive cost structure and rebalance the company's global workforce skillsets, helping AMD to continue delivering industry-leading products while improving productivity, reducing time-to-market and better aligning with key industry trends that are expected to drive growth."Reducing our cost structure and focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities will strengthen AMD's competitiveness and allow us to aggressively pursue a balanced set of strategic activities designed to accelerate future growth," said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. "The actions we are taking are designed to improve our ability to consistently address the needs of our global customer base and stake leadership positions in lower power, emerging markets and the cloud."AMD expects that the restructuring plan will result operational savings, primarily in operating expense, of approximately $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 and $118 million in 2012, primarily through a reduction of its global workforce by approximately 10% and the termination of existing contractual commitments. The workforce reduction will occur across all functions globally and is expected to be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2012. Based on anticipated savings from the restructuring plan, AMD expects fourth quarter 2011 operating expenses will be approximately $610 million.As a result of implementing efficiencies across the company's operations, AMD expects to save approximately $90 million in 2012 operating expenses in addition to the restructuring plan savings, resulting in more than $200 million of expected combined operational savings in 2012.The company expects to reinvest a significant portion of the savings to fund initiatives designed to accelerate AMD's strategies for lower power, emerging markets, and the cloud.The company's actions pursuant to the restructuring plan will take place primarily during fourth quarter of 2011, with some restructuring plan activities extending into 2012. The company currently estimates that it will record restructuring expense in the fourth quarter of 2011 and in 2012 of approximately $101 million and $4 million, respectively. Of the total restructuring expense, approximately $56 million will be future cash expenditures in 2011, $33 million will be future cash expenditures in 2012 and $15 million will be future cash expenditures in 2013.
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