New York: The worldâs top software firm Microsoft has been asked to cut its workforce by 10%, or about 9,100 employees, to tell the market that profits are more important than revenue growth in difficult times. Brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Coâs analyst Brad Reback has said in a report on Microsoft that such layoff exercise âwould be a healthy move for the company.â The move would be well received by the market and would âsignal that profitability is more important than revenue growth during this very difficult time,â Reback added. Calling for a 10% reduction on the companyâs payrolls, Reback said in his report for the institutional investors of Microsoft, this would result in an approximately 10% gain in its earnings per share. The software giant had close to 91,000 employees on its payrolls at the end of July-September quarter. Earlier in October, Microsoft had put in place a hiring freeze on some of its divisions, such as entertainment and devices businesses that make products like X-Box and Zune. There have been some unconfirmed reports on blogs that the company would announce some major layoffs in the first month of 2009. Microsoft is scheduled to release its second-quarter results for the fiscal year 2008-09 on January 22. Battling the economic crisis, companies in their bid to save costs, have announced more than one lakh job cuts in December alone in the US, while so far in 2008 there have been close to 20 lakh layoffs. http://www.financialexpress.com/news/microsoft-asked-to-lay-off-over-9-000-employees/404170/
layoff the guy who ask microsoft to layoff 10% or about 9100 of the employees. as for investors, layoffs etc don't matter if the stock goes up. it's growth and general health of the economy that determines stock prices or fortunes of companies.
Brad would sleep very well at night knowing that he put 9,100 families out of work. This man is a psychopath.
This same Jackass will be complaining about missed release dates, disappointed customers, bugs, and lost a loss of intellectual property edge next.
this is not news. Microsoft does a "rank and yank" yearly. Normally it's 5% though. Most well run companies do this annually since it's simpler than firing people one at a time and cuts back on age discrimination lawsuits etc.