AMD To Cut 1,100 Jobs In First Quarter & Saks and Neiman Marcus Announce Layoffs & Barclay Cutting Jobs and Hertz and Roche

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

AMD To Cut 1,100 Jobs In First Quarter

mailto:[e-mail]

by Benjamin Pimentel



SAN FRANCISCO - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. on Friday said it plans to cut its

workforce by 9%, or roughly 1,100 positions, in the first quarter. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-

based chip giant also said Executive Chairman Hector Ruiz and Chief Executive Dirk

Meyer will each take a temporary 20% cut in base salary. The semiconductor maker is

also suspending its 401(k) company match.



Saks and Neiman Marcus Announce Layoffs
by Stephanie Rosenbloom


The tide of retail layoffs is swelling, with two of the nation’s premier luxury department stores cutting hundreds of jobs as they struggle to endure a freeze in consumer spending.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/saks-inc/inde...

Saks Inc. said late Thursday that it was cutting 1,100 in-store and corporate support jobs, or about 9 percent of its work force, eliminating merit-based wage increases and suspending matching contributions to employee 401(k) plans for at least a year. On Wednesday, Neiman Marcus said it was cutting 375 jobs, or 2.3 percent of its work force.

After one of the worst holiday shopping seasons in decades, retailers of all stripes are suffering. But the luxury sector has been hit especially hard. Sales of luxury goods fell 27.6 percent in December compared with December 2007, according to SpendingPulse, a report by MasterCard Advisors that estimates sales from all forms of payment, including credit cards and cash. The decline in the luxury category in December was greater than the 24.4 percent drop in November.

Sales fell by double digits at both Saks and Neiman Marcus last month, and in recent earnings conference calls the retailers acknowledged their profit margins were taking a beating after they offered deep discounts to attract consumers.

“Our financial performance is increasingly being challenged by some of the most difficult economic conditions our company has faced in its 84-year history,” Stephen I. Sadove, the chief executive of Saks Inc., said in a statement.

Retailing analysts say job and inventory cuts are demoralizing for workers and are likely to upset vendors, but can make the difference between having to seek bankruptcy protection and avoiding it.

Saks is making cuts in other areas, too, including travel, marketing, information technology, procurement and distribution and logistics. The company said it was lowering its planned capital expenditures to about $60 million (less than half of its projected 2008 level). It is also aiming to trim the inventory it receives this year by 20 percent.


A Second Day of Job Cuts at Barclays
By JULIA WERDIGIER and LANDON THOMAS Jr.

LONDON — Barclays, the British banking giant, said on Wednesday that it was in the process of cutting an additional 2,100 jobs in its retail, commercial banking and credit card businesses.

On Tuesday, the bank said that it would cut 2,100 positions at its investment banking unit, Barclays Capital, at its wealth management business and its fund management operation. That brings the total of planned job cuts at Barclays this year to 4,600, including 400 information technology positions that the bank cut last week.

The cuts come shortly after the $1.75 billion acquisition of a part of Lehman Brothers — a deal that Barclays’ president, Robert E. Diamond Jr., hopes will vault the bank into the upper tier of global banks. This fall, Barclays’ investment banking division in the United States absorbed 10,000 employees with the acquisition from Lehman Brothers, but 3,000 jobs were subsequently cut.

Graham Goddard, deputy general secretary of the British trade union Unite, criticized Barclays for failing to communicate the total number of jobs at risk and accused the management of following a strategy of “death by a thousand cuts.”

“We cannot continue with this situation of daily job cuts without any justification or explanation of the broader strategy for the bank,” Mr. Goddard said. “In this economic environment, it is not acceptable for Barclays staff to arrive at work each day with the dread that they could be next in what appears to be a lottery of job losses.”

A spokeswoman for the bank said that most of the positions at risk had already been communicated to the staff. “We will take all possible measures to mitigate compulsory redundancies through redeployment, using natural attrition, releasing of contractors, closing vacancies and opening voluntary redundancy registers,” the bank said in a statement on Wednesday.

The total cuts represented about 3 percent of the bank’s global work force of 156,000 at the end of October.

Barclays Capital, the investment bank, will absorb the bulk of the losses, 1,300 in total, while the wealth management unit will lose 500 positions and Barclays Global Investors 300.

The cuts are the latest to grip financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Onetime high-flying banks, like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Credit Suisse and UBS, have taken a sharp knife to their investment banking divisions. With the outlook glum, analysts expect the trend to continue.

Most of the layoffs are in areas hardest hit by the slowdown — fixed income and all areas related to the structuring and securitization of investment products.

While the cuts were to be expected, given the paring done by rivals of Barclays, they also highlight the challenge facing managers as the bank tries to expand at a time that institutions like Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are becoming more conservative and risk averse.

Barclays’ aggressive push to become a diversified investment bank puts it in a small group that includes Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.


Hertz to cut more than 4,000 jobs
(Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
DETROIT (Reuters) – Hertz Global Holdings Inc said on Friday that it would cut more than 4,000 jobs in a worldwide restructuring through the first quarter due to falling demand, and the car rental company's shares fell nearly 9 percent.

Hertz expects annualized savings of $150 million to $170 million in 2009 from the job cuts, it said. It expects to take a fourth-quarter charge of $20 million to $25 million for the cuts.

The cuts are in the car and equipment rental businesses as well as in corporate and support areas in all regions focused on positions that do not have direct contact with customers, Hertz said in a statement.

Hertz will have cut its workforce by 32 percent since August 2006 with the latest round of reductions, it said.

Hertz said it could not predict when its markets would improve. The declines pressured the volume of rentals, the pricing on rentals and the residual values of vehicles in its fleets during the fourth quarter.

The company estimated fourth-quarter net cash flow at about $1.75 billion and said it had ended 2008 with liquidity of about $4.9 billion.

Shares of Hertz were down 47 cents, or 8.7 percent, at $4.92 in midday New York Stock Exchange trade.


Roche to cut 780 positions over next 2-3 years


BASEL, Switzerland – Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding AG plans to cut 780 positions over the next two to three years, a spokeswoman said Friday,
Martina Rupp said the figure cited Thursday by Chief Financial Officer Erich Hunziker was not a revelation of new job cuts, but represented a "consolidated figure" of changes already announced last year.

She said some affected staff may be transferred or retained in other capacities.

Rupp cited changes in the company's drug manufacturing business as the main reason, and noted the planned closing of a production site in Nutley, New Jersey.