It’s becoming a familiar story. Texas Instruments (TI), in announcing its fourth-quarter results, said it will reduce its workforce by 12%, or 3,400 jobs.
The company expects to save about $700 million after all its reductions are made, including those announced in October for the restructuring of its wireless business. The reductions are expected to be completed in the third quarter.
Most of the reductions will come in internal support functions and non-core product lines, so a greater percentage of dollars will go directly toward developing and supporting analog and embedded processing products, TI CEO Rich Templeton said in a prepared statement.
TI also said it will not sell the merchant baseband business, a move it had outlined in October. Instead, it will run it internally as an end-of-life business, CFO Kevin March told analysts in a conference call. “As far as our outlook for wireless, that has not changed,” he said. “The growth opportunity in cell phones will continue to be in the smartphones, the 3G type phones, those phones where the user interface becomes a lot more important to customers and therefore the applications processor becomes more important.”
TI’s revenue dropped 30% compared with the fourth quarter of 2007 and declined 26% compared with the third quarter of 2008. Revenue in the fourth quarter 2008 was $2.49 and net income was $107 million.
Last week, Intel said it will close two assembly test facilities and halt production at a fabrication facility, affecting 5,000 to 6,000 employees worldwide. Microsoft will lay off 5,000. Ericsson is cutting 5,000 jobs as well. On Jan. 14, Motorola announced a further reduction in its workforce by about 4,000 positions.
On the carrier side, Sprint yesterday said it will lay off 14% of its staff, or 8,000 people.