Seagate cuts 14 percent of its workforce due to declining HDD sales
Dwindling demand for physical hard drives has already led Seagate to eliminate the jobs of 1,600 employees from its global workforce of 46,000 which spans across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas.
Now, the company has announced that it is planning to cut another 6,500 jobs or 14 percent of its remaining staff. The employees who have lost their jobs will be let go over the next 12 months and Seagate will end up paying out $164 million as a result.
The company blames a slowing desktop PC market for declining sales of its hard drives. Flash-based storage, used in laptops and mobile phones, along with the rise of cloud storage solutions have both hit Seagate’s bottom line hard. However, the company’s CEO, Steve Luczo, has tried his best to reassure investors that there is still demand for its physical hard drives.
In a statement on Seagate’s site, Luczo, said: "The evolution of mobile and cloud data driven environments continues to define itself as requiring significant amounts of mass storage. We believe the long-term trend of exabyte storage demand growth exceeding [hard disk drive] areal density growth remains intact for the foreseeable future".
In the past three months, Seagate estimates that it has earned $2.65 billion in revenue with a gross margin of 25 percent. The company will release its full financial figures for 2016 to July 1 on Tuesday, August 2.
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