Cisco Systems plans to eliminate jobs as it focuses in on core businesses such as routing and switching, the company’s executives said on Wednesday after announcing an 11 per cent decline in third-quarter profit.
The financial report was the first since Chairman and CEO John Chambers laid out a plan to streamline Cisco’s organization and renew its focus on core businesses such as routing and switching. In addition to disclosing the job cuts, Cisco said it was abandoning a standing goal of achieving year-over-year revenue gains between 12 pe rcent and 17 per cent each quarter.
Cisco has extended itself into too many businesses and faces growing competition on its home turf, especially in network switches, Chambers has warned. At the same time, the public sector, a particularly important market for Cisco, has been cutting spending in all parts of the world, he said on Wednesday.
Along with grim news about the third quarter ended April 30, with revenue up less than five per cent from a year earlier, Cisco estimated that revenue in the current quarter would be flat or up less than two per cent.
The job cuts are beginning with a recently announced early retirement program, said Gary Moore, the company’s newly appointed chief operating officer, who is directing a program to cut US$1 billion out of Cisco’s annual operating expenses over the next year.
“To be clear, we do anticipate a workforce reduction on a global basis, affecting both our full-time and contractor workforce,” Moore said. Cisco won’t say more until after employees are informed around the end of summer, typically defined as August or September. The job cuts themselves will create one-time costs of $500 million to $1 billion, Cisco said.
Cisco is in the midst of a 120-day review of its entire product portfolio to look for cost savings and businesses it doesn’t belong in, such as the Flip video camera unit that was recently shut down. The company said it is now clearly focused on routing, switching and services; collaboration; data center virtualization and cloud; video; and business process architectures.
“No excuses: We must act quickly, we are, and we will,” Chambers said.
