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AMD will cut its workforce by 10 per cent to save $118m in 2012
CHIP DESIGNER AMD has announced plans to lay off approximately 10 per cent of its workforce to cut costs.
Since AMD appointed Rory Read as CEO earlier this year there have been a few months of relative silence from the firm, but now Read has announced that AMD will engage in restructuring to save $10m in the fourth quarter of 2011 and $118m in 2012. As part of that restructuring around 10 per cent of the company's workforce will be laid off, which amounts to about 1,000 jobs.
Read said the job losses are part of reducing the firm's cost structure and "focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities". In a statement that tries to calm investors rather than employees worried about their jobs, Read said, "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."
While Read mentioned the cloud in his statement, AMD also said that the money it saves from slashing its workforce will be ploughed back into research and development to reduce power consumption and address emerging markets.
This year saw AMD launch its first consumer Fusion processor that combines CPU and GPU cores on-die. AMD has bet a lot on Fusion clawing back lost ground from Intel in the mainstream market and some analysts are claiming that the market for combined CPU and GPU chips is growing fast, with AMD doing particularly well. Nevertheless, AMD needs to cut costs and wait for more applications to arrive with GPGPU acceleration before it can really stick it to Chipzilla.
AMD said its workforce reduction will occur throughout the company and at various locations throughout the world, just in time for Christmas. µ
Tags: Amd
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My condolences to those dismissed. It sucks to be at the whims of a CEO who has been in charge for only weeks. Let's hope that AMD eventually finds it's way as they have some good products and we need them around to prevent a complete monopoly by a criminal corporation.
@Mike - that scenario is SO 1990s.
AMD needs to take the 10% "savings" and hire a bunch of young engineers in India or China who have no experience to replace those in the US who depart the company. Having no background in the product, and no experience in industry, the product quality will be very poor, and the executives will be scratching their heads wondering why overall headcount went up but productivity went down.
This will cause accelerated cost reductions by replacing more of the experienced designers with even more young newbees, and the downward spiral will take the company into CH11.
First they remove 10%, mostly people who were doing less important work or underperformers.
Then they redistribute the work to the other 90%, without paying them more.
The best employees left start looking for other jobs, because they don't want to live in fear of further layoffs and they don't like the extra unpaid work.
Then the remaining employees have to do even more extra work, also unpaid. They don't have either the skills or the time to do it properly.
Finally, the company closes its doors.
Been there, twice. It never ends well.