Texas Instruments announces layoffs

650 SOULS are to be laid off by Texas Instruments, due to slowing orders and a drop in mobile phone chip sales.

TI announced the layoffs along with its quarterly financial report yesterday. In Q3, TI earned $563 million which translates to 43 cents a share, down by 27 per cent from the same time last year.

The company warned on Monday that orders were slowing rapidly and said it would cut jobs to save money. The firm’s revenue also slumped by eight per cent to $3.39 billion.

Pessimistically, Texas Instruments reckoned they would also fall below analyst predictions for the fourth quarter, predicting sales of $2.83 billion to $3.07 billion.

The 650 layoffs are to affect the work force of a TI division spread throughout six countries which produces baseband chips, for beaming a phone call to a cell tower. The firm says it is also in talks to flog another part of the unit which supplies off-the-shelf baseband processors and which has been flailing ever since its biggest client, Motorola, dumped it.

The 30,000 employee company reckons the job cuts will save $200 million a year. µ