subject: Amd Intends To Lay Off 10% Staff In The World [print this page] AMD said in a statement that the company will cut 10% of its staff, due to the damage caused by the weak performance of the PC market and the delay of the manufacturing activities.
AMD said the job cuts should help the company to save the cost of approximately $ 10 million in the fourth quarter and $ 118 million in the next year. The cuts are projected to complete by the end of the first quarter of 2012. It is reported that the layoffs will involve about 1,400 employees, about 12% of its workforce. Until the end of the third quarter, AMD's total number of employees is 12019. This is the first major initiative since AMD's new CEO Rory Read took office in the August of this year.
AMD is facing a common problem in the industry, which is the slow growth of the PC sales, particularly in the U.S. and especially the European market. It is mainly due to the poor economic conditions and the competition from smart phones and tablet PCs. While PC's sales are still growing, its growth rate has slowed down significantly. In the third quarter, PC's sales increased, but the increase is much lower than expected, which led to the market fears in the holiday shopping season.
Most of AMD's business comes from PC. Its market share in the smart phones and tablet PC fields is much. The responsibility of Ruide is largely to help develop a corporate strategy to penetrate into those emerging computing markets. In contrast with AMD, its competitor Intel accounts for a large share in these markets. Over the past few years, AMD and Intel's share in the PC market has made a stable equilibrium state. The two companies have already started competition in a new dimension. In the global PC market, Intel has about 80% share. The remaining share is mainly occupied by AMD.
However, the mobile device market is completely open, while AMD and Intel are both in a weak position in this market. Compared with Intel, AMD suffered a more serious damage, because its size is relatively small. This damage is the key reason to expel AMD's former CEO Dirk Meyer in the January of this year.
The analysts of the industry said that another factor that promoted AMD to announce the layoff activity is that the company is facing production problems, which led to its latest chip shipments delayed.
