ESPN said some of the job cuts are coming through attrition, or unfilled open positions, and didn’t disclose the precise number or types of workers who are being let go. ESPN, which operates several cable channels in addition to its flagship, has about 7,000 employees.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Since announcing that organizational update on April 25, EA has sacked 10 percent of its workforce, CFO Blake Jorgensen confirmed. The company had about 9,000 employees at 2012’s end, so some 900 of them lost their jobs as a result of the cuts.

The headcount reduction, which EA hopes will push it further toward its goal of achieving a 20 percent operating margin, increased the company’s operating expenses for the quarter by about $15 million. According to EA, that was largely due to severance, and the company says that following this spike, its OpEx will begin going down.

“We’ve taken a hard look at the organization,” said EA Chairman Larry Probst. “We have really focused the product portfolio. We’ve made some adjustments in terms of headcount and operating expenses. My job is to make sure that we’re growing the top line and the bottom line and rationalizing headcount and cost in conjunction with revenue. I think we’ve done a really good job of that in nailing down our fiscal ’14 plan.”

If that’s the case, EA should be well positioned for growth in the year ahead, particularly now that it has secured a long-term licensing deal with Disney to make games based on the “Star Wars” franchise.

On Tuesday, Cisco sacked about 500 workers in one of those occasional “realignment” efforts. The company confirmed the cuts to AllThingsD.

“We routinely review our business to determine where we need to align investments based on growth opportunities,” Cisco spokeswoman Karen Tillman said. “This week, Cisco performed a limited restructuring that will impact approximately 500 employees, less than 1 percent of our population globally.”

It’s not clear where exactly Cisco swung the axe, but Networkworld, which first reported the layoffs, suggests that the employees most affected were involved with data center business development.

As reported Thursday evening by the Wall Street Journal, the cuts will eliminate more than 10 percent of the hardware maker’s workforce.

A Motorola spokesman confirmed the company is making cuts, but declined to go into details.

“These cuts are a continuation of the reductions we announced last summer,” Motorola said in a statement. “It’s obviously very hard for the employees concerned, and we are committed to helping them through this difficult transition.”

Google announced in August it would cut some 4,000 jobs, or 20 percent of the Motorola workforce.

In December, Motorola announced a significant cutback of its South Korean operations, a move that resulted in 500 job losses. The same month, Google said it was selling Motorola’s set-top box business to Arris for $2.35 billion.

In addition to building out its LTE network, taking out ads punching back at AT&T and completing its deal to merge with MetroPCS, it seems the No. 4. U.S. carrier is also prepping layoffs, though it is keeping quiet on the details.

The cutbacks are expected to hit as early as tomorrow and could result in more than 100 job losses, according to the Seattle Times, which first reported the impending layoffs.

A T-Mobile representative declined to comment.

The timing of the cuts comes just as it appears the merger deal has passed the final hurdles. MetroPCS noted on Tuesday that the federal antitrust review period has ended, and the company has slated an April 12 meeting for its shareholders to approve the deal.

Although some jobs will no doubt be cut as part of the deal, T-Mobile is expected to keep much of MetroPCS’ separate brand and large retail presence even as it works to quickly transition MetroPCS customers to devices that run on the T-Mobile network.

People familiar with CEO Steve Hansen’s plans say he intends to lay off about 50 of the company’s 240 employees, and will end up hiring another 25 people in the coming months.

The company also plans on shifting its focus away from its blog advertising network business, and to concentrate on a core group of music and pop-culture sites it owns, including Celebuzz, Idolator, and Spin, the magazine it bought last year and turned into a digital-only property.

Earlier this year, the company raised a new $15 million round from existing investors, including Redpoint Ventures and Focus Ventures.

Hansen, a digital veteran whose resume includes GeoCities and Yahoo, was hired as BuzzMedia’s president last summer; he was elevated to the top job amid chatter that the company had missed sales targets. In a letter to the staff he has distributed this morning, Hansen describes the firings and hirings as a “rebalancing of existing skill sets and the addition of new ones … There is a lot that is right at Buzz, but much that still needs to change.”

Some of the changes may not come as a surprise to BuzzMedia’s staff; other Web publishers say they’ve been seeing BuzzMedia resumes circulate in the last few months.

Here’s the full memo:

Note to The Company

When first joining BuzzMedia, I told you that while successful, the company needed to evolve in order to achieve it’s true potential. Today we will be making a number of difficult, yet necessary organizational changes across all departments and levels of the company in order to achieve that goal.

Transformation sometimes requires making very hard decisions. Make no mistake about it, today will be difficult for all of us but our success is dependent upon greater focus on our audience, evolving our portfolio of brands, all supported by powerful technology and data. We need to align the organization around those objectives and today is a first step, albeit a very hard one.

Proper organizational alignment requires a rebalancing of existing skill sets and the addition of new ones that focus on those key areas that will help us keep pace and grow stronger within our industry. Embarking on that path necessitates a number of painful personnel reductions that will directly or indirectly impact all of us. The fact that so many friends and colleagues will be effected by what is happening today is not a referendum on them as contributors. On the contrary, today we will be saying goodbye to a group of people that have shown great passion, commitment and sacrifice for BuzzMedia. We owe these individuals a debt of gratitude for they were an important part of what Buzz is today and I’d like to thank them all.

These changes are not made lightly. Over the past several months I’ve met with many of you to better understand how the company works. I’ve taken great pains to personally review structure, process, priorities and people. There is a lot that is right at Buzz, but much that still needs to change. Success in our world will come down to having the right people focused on the right tasks and providing them with the resources they need to succeed.

While difficult in the short term, the changes being made today will make us a healthier company in the long run.

In 2013 we really need to focus on doing three things very well:

• Drive higher level of audience and audience engagement on our owned and operated sites
• Provide better solutions for our advertising partners and users
• Create a technology/publishing/knowledge platform that will support all of our sites

Successfully achieving these goals will allow us to legitimately lay claim to being a market leader in the digital publishing world. That is my goal for 2013. The world that we live in is getting more competitive by the day and doing a much better job for our audience, advertisers and editors is essential.

Although today is a difficult but necessary step in the evolution of our company. we make these changes from a position of market leadership, strong financial support and historical revenue momentum. And because we move forward from this position of strength, we can use these challenging times to become even better.

I think at a time like this it’s particularly important to reaffirm to you my commitment to transparency, accountability and high standards — both internally, with our partners and throughout our industry. Our reputation and how we treat each other is just as important to me as our financial success. I want each and every one of us to be proud of what we’re builing here — and how we’re doing it.

Affected employees will be notified mid-day today. I have also scheduled a company wide call for Friday at 10:30AM PST. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you have questions.

From everyone on the executive team, I wish you all the best moving forward.

Steve

To do so, the Japanese-based company acquired San Francisco-based OpenFeint and established a U.S. headquarters in the same city. It then purchased Funzio, a mobile game developer, to help make hit games for the platform. In all, it spent $300 million.

But now the company is pulling back on its plans — just a bit.

While Gree is a massive entity in Japan, with $2 billion in annual revenue, its efforts in North America so far have produced much less. The company does not always break out revenue, but in August, it reported that sales in the U.S. totaled $16.9 million in the second quarter.

In the conclusion of a two-year spending spree, Gree announced in December that it was rethinking its platform ambitions and laid off about 25 members of its platform team to focus on mobile game development. I caught up with Anil Dharni, Funzio founder and Gree’s SVP of its studio operations, in San Francisco last week, to better understand where the the company is headed.

Here are some highlights from the conversation:

Why did Gree shut down OpenFeint in the U.S.? Does it no longer believe in the ability to build a network where players can discover games and other people to play with (a.k.a, a mobile platform like Facebook)?

Anil Dharni: We acquired OpenFeint two years ago, when Gree wanted to get into the U.S. It was working with a slew of indie developers, and over the past two years, we learned about the publishing business and the platform business. We’ve solidified our position with developers, so we didn’t need the platform team [in the U.S.] and moved production back to Japan.

So, what’s the status of the platform in the U.S.?

Dharni: It’s just being developed in Japan. It’s in beta [in the U.S.] today. Our learnings from the process is that we don’t want to have a me-too publishing strategy. We have to offer more, like game analytics, consulting, push notifications, game mechanics, etc. We are not ready to release those capabilities today, but we think we can bring it altogether.

The transfer of the platform development to Japan led to the elimination of 25 jobs in the U.S. How many employees do you have today?

There are 400 employees in the San Francisco offices, Dharni said, which are directly across the street from AT&T Park. The company has also opened a Canadian studio in Vancouver, where it has 10 employees. Both offices are hiring.

Crime City is one of the company’s oldest titles (launched in August 2010), and it continues to be in the Top 50 highest-grossing apps today. How does it continue to attract players?

“A lot of people talk about shorter lifespan of games on mobile than on Facebook,” Dharni said. But by working with his Japanese counterparts, they’ve been able to learn how to retain users for longer periods of time and increase the user base. It has required them to release more content and new mechanics inside of the games to keep people coming back.

How is hard-core being defined on mobile?

The more strategy-based the game is, the more hard-core it is, he said. “It means a smaller audience that monetizes better.” Genres may include first-person shooters, role-playing and card games (a popular category in Japan that challenges players to collect a deck of cards by completing a number of mini games). Dharni said that more developers have become focused on hard-core as the cost to acquire a player on mobile has gone up, since they can deliver a return on investment over a longer period of time.

As games become more hard-core, is the cost of developing a game going up?

No, it hasn’t, Dharni said, but the amount of time it takes to launch a game has gotten longer. “We used to launch games without events and other mechanics and then layer them in later. Now, they are included from the time of beta, which means testing the games out for a long time in either Canada or Australia.”

Is Android catching up to the iPhone in terms of revenue?

It is, if you aren’t successful on the iPad, Dharni said. But if you are, then Android is not competitive yet.

Time Inc. corporate parent, Time Warner, disclosed the number as part of its guidance for its 2013 financials.

Restructuring charges aren’t new for Time Inc., because the publisher has been downsizing itself for years. In 2012, the company racked up $27 million in restructuring charges, up from $18 million in 2011.

Time Inc.’s Q4 numbers help explain why CEO Laura Lang is cutting some 500 jobs: Revenue was down 7 percent, to $967 million, and ad revenue was down 4 percent. But the publisher is still the world’s biggest, and it still makes piles of money: Operating income was down 3 percent, to $200 million.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes may have more to say about the future of his publishing unit during his call later this am; I’ll listen in.

Happy Super Bowl weekend! In case you missed them and are bored waiting for the kickoff, here are the top 10 stories on AllThingsD from the week of 1/28:

1.) Twitter Hacked; 250,000 User Accounts Potentially Compromised

2.) BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

3.) HBO Go Is Coming to Apple TV. Why Isn’t Everything Coming to Apple TV?

4.) PSA: Unlocking Phones Without Carrier Permission Becomes Illegal on Saturday

5.) Time Inc. Braces for Layoffs This Week [Update: They happened -- here's the memo too]

6.) Twitter’s Vine App Doesn’t Have a Porn Problem. It Has a Porn Discovery Problem.

7.) iPhone Users Rack Up the Highest Carrier Bills

8.) Sales Talks Fell Through, So Ad Exchange AdBrite Shuts Down

9.) The Next Step for Computing: The Storage Fabric

10.) Apple Announces iPad Maxi

Here’s the memo from CEO Laura Lang:

Today we are beginning the painful process of reducing our global staff of 8,000 by approximately six percent. I first want to thank the people who will be leaving us for their years of hard work and dedication to the company. They are so much more than Time Inc. employees. They are good friends and trusted colleagues with whom we have worked closely. Losing them is going to be very difficult for everyone. They come from all areas of Time Inc. across our locations — both domestic and international. I am grateful for their service and I know you join me in wishing each of them all the best.

With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. To make this change, we need to operate as smartly and efficiently as possible to create room for critical investments and new initiatives. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.

I know the coming days and weeks will be hard and I want to thank you in advance for your patience as we work through this period.

Laura

If you’re one of the publisher’s 8,000 employees, the good news is that many people I’ve talked to seem to believe that an earlier report (which I’ve repeated) of up to 700 layoffs may be too high, and that the total may end up closer to 500. Then again, no one has offered a definitive headcount.

The other consensus opinion is that the cuts will affect just about every corner of the company, and most of its magazines (it publishes 21 in the U.S.).

But there are plenty of other Time Inc. employees who don’t work at a particular title, and centralized departments like research and HR will be affected, too.

Bottom line: The cuts will be big, and they’ll be the most significant move CEO Laura Lang has made in her first year on the job.

No comment from Time Inc. PR.

I don’t have more details about the coming cuts. But the Time Inc. employees I’ve spoken to seem to put great stock in Keith Kelly’s report from earlier this month, which predicted that up to 700 of the publisher’s 8,000 employees may go in this round.

If so, that will eclipse the company’s last big round of layoffs, in 2008, when former CEO Ann Moore cut about 600 jobs. Those layoffs, and subsequent cost-cuts, have allowed Time Inc. to stay profitable as the magazine industry contracts.

But the top line keeps dropping: In the third quarter of last year, Time Inc generated $840 million in revenue, down from $1.1 billion in 2008. Meanwhile, parent company Time Warner has continued to evolve into a cable TV conglomerate.

New CEO Laura Lang has been on the job for a year, and has pushed her company to look for new revenue streams, including digital deals; last year, she brokered an agreement to sell iPad subscriptions via Apple’s iTunes store.

No comment from Time Inc. or parent company Time Warner.

The Finnish handset maker said on Thursday that it would cut 300 jobs and transfer hundreds more to other firms. All told, 1,100 jobs, mostly in IT services, will be removed from Nokia’s payroll, with about 820 added to those of its operating partners, India’s HCL Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services. Nokia describes the cuts as an “IT realignment.”

The moves — which ironically follow the preannouncement last week of better-than-expected fourth-quarter results — are part of a massive cost savings plan Nokia announced last summer. At the time, the company said it intended to eliminate 10,000 jobs in its mobile division by the end of this year. Today’s cuts are said to be the last from that plan, which was implemented to “rescale” Nokia’s operation as it scrambles to reverse its fast-declining fortunes.

I just received this internal memo, shared by an HP spokesman, from Robert Youngjohns, the newly appointed head of Autonomy, to his team. The highlights include confirmation — but no specific number — of coming layoffs at Autonomy. AllThingsD reported in December that about 70 people, most of them in sales roles, would be getting the ax.

The layoffs in the sales jobs are coinciding with a boost in R&D spending and the hiring of some 50 new engineers at Autonomy. Additionally, Youngjohns announced big plans to tie an Autonomy product, Aurasma 2.0, to HP’s massive printing and personal systems group. The point is to make printing a “cloud citizen,” the memo reads. However, some of the job cuts will be coming within the group that builds Aurasma.

From: Robert Youngjohns — HP Software Autonomy IM
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2013 7:50 AM
Subject: HP Autonomy Increases R&D Investments & Refocuses Aurasma

Team,

As we enter 2013, the focus of the HP Autonomy team is to position our business for growth and success. We have three priorities: making customer success the heart of everything that we do; building great products with a clear, funded roadmap; and leveraging the rest of HP to gain access to markets and customers. Our priorities are aligned with both HP Software as well as the larger HP, and I am pleased with the progress we’ve made so far and very optimistic about the future of the business.

In the spirit of being open and transparent, I want to let you know about two changes we’re making in the business:

First, we continue to invest in HP Autonomy and are aligning our resources with the priorities for HP Software overall. As part of this, we are continuing to invest in our R&D capabilities around the world; in fact, we expect to hire at least 50 additional engineers for Autonomy in the near term to lead new initiatives and further our technical prowess.

Secondly, with the announcement of Aurasma 2.0, we are ready to move to the next stage of this exciting business and focus on commercialization and revenue generation, including plans to feature Aurasma in products from other parts of HP – notably PPS, where the technology is key to PPS’s strategic intent to link print back to the Internet making it an equal mobile, social, and cloud citizen with digital display technologies (e.g., smartphones, tablets, PC’s, and TV). For instance, our close collaboration with the team on the ‘HP Live Photo’ app for iOS is one of the first instances of product integration in action.

This transition will require some changes to the Aurasma business as we to move to the next stage. While a number of roles will remain largely unaffected by this, other roles within Aurasma will no longer be required going forward and some work force reduction is likely.

We will of course hold individual discussions with employees who may be potentially affected, although the timing will vary by country, and will follow the appropriate legal processes relative to reorganizing and workforce reductions. Where applicable, we have consulted with all appropriate Workers’ Councils.

We will be working with affected employees to redeploy as many as possible into other job opportunities across our business where skill sets and interests align with our business priorities.

Thank you for your continued professionalism and for your ongoing efforts in helping us build the HP Autonomy business into a tremendous success story.

My staff and I are available should you have any questions or needs.

Robert

This morning, the New York-based company handed out pink slips to about 25 employees, or about 35 percent of its staff, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Lot18 will now employ 46, half as many as it did a year ago.

It is the second layoff in the past year for the startup, which started selling wine online in November 2010.

The first round was tied to the discontinuation of its travel and food businesses, which it had expanded into shortly before raising $30 million in venture capital in late 2011. Investors include Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and FirstMark Capital.

This time, the layoffs are connected to a shift in strategy. Rather than exclusively operate as a flash sales company, which sells bottles of wine at a discount to a free membership base, it will also try to sell wine through a subscription model.

The model is already well established by others in the industry, such as Global Wine Company, which runs the New York Times Wine Club, for instance, and Direct Wines, which operates a wine club for The Wall Street Journal.

The recurring revenue stream is far more predictable than getting members to return to the site and pay for single orders. As it stands right now, Lot18 is a marketplace, so it does not own any inventory or warehouses. Instead, the company’s headcount is a considerable expense, as are its marketing costs to get new members — just like other sites, including Groupon. In addition, it subsidizes shipping, since wine is so heavy and fragile.

According to a spokesperson, the new initiative is allowing the company to scale back on the time and attention that the flash sales business requires. However, not all employees will be let go immediately and Lot18 plans to do select hiring for the new business.

In a statement, CEO Jay Sung said: “The team we have — and many of the excellent people who left the company today — worked incredibly hard to make Lot18 strong, but we need to resource according to our new business model and operate the existing business more efficiently with considerably less burn.”

The cuts impacted all parts of the company’s business, including marketing, procurement and merchandising. Andrew Koch, the company’s VP of product, left the company recently, and we are hearing that Barbara Anderson, the company’s chief counsel, is leaving voluntarily. Lot18’s founder, Philip James, remains with the company and is leading the launch of the new subscription business.

In the fourth quarter, the company tested two new subscription services. Customers could either sign up to receive six bottles for $99 a month, or 12 bottles for $149 a month (the first month cost $49 and $79, respectively).

Since its launch, the current club has exceeded its growth targets, the spokesperson said. A new product launch will occur in early 2013.

The latest is Michael Goddard, a 25-year AMD veteran whose last title at that company was corporate VP for product design engineering and chief engineer on client products. At AMD since 1988, according to his LinkedIn profile he changed jobs this month, joining South Korean chip giant Samsung as a VP and system architect at its facility in Austin, Texas.

During his years at AMD, Goddard (pictured), a deeply respected engineer at the company, worked closely in the late 1990s with Dirk Meyer, the AMD engineer who later served as its CEO from 2008 to 2011. He also spent some time with AMD’s design operations in India. People close to AMD were surprised by the move, and say its unlikely that Goddard was pushed out. Goddard couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, though he has been spotted at industry events in recent days quietly telling people he had started the new job at Samsung. An AMD spokesman confirmed Goddard’s departure, adding that the company is continuing to make strategic hires.

Goddard’s move comes amid a talent exodus from AMD. Before Goddard, at least 26 executives of varying levels of seniority left the company in recent months. Some were fired in earlier rounds of reorganizations ordered by CEO Rory Read, some left for new jobs.

The company cut 15 percent of its workforce this fall and is expected to cut even more jobs early in 2013. It has also been reported to be exploring options, code companies use when they’re considering a breakup or sale, though AMD has since strenuously denied that it is actively seeking a buyer.

In fairness, it hasn’t been all departures at AMD. In August, it hired Jim Keller, the former head chip designer at Apple. And last year it hired its CIO away from Hewlett-Packard.

AMD shares fell today by more than 2 percent to $2.43. The shares have fallen by more than 55 percent this year.

That newspaper reported today, in a thinly sourced story, that as many as 200 people were due to lose their jobs at the British software subsidiary in a shake-up expected soon.

Sources familiar with the company’s plans tell AllThingsD that the number of jobs expected to be cut is actually fewer than 70; the cuts will focus on sales personnel, all of whom were originally hired prior to HP’s acquisition of the company. Additionally, the job cuts were put in motion in September, well before HP made public its intention to write down the value of Autonomy by about $5 billion. Layoffs in European countries, like those in the U.K., are more complicated to carry out, and so take months to complete.

In explaining the writedown, HP, which paid north of $11 billion for Autonomy in 2011, alleged that the British company’s executives essentially cooked the books in order to make Autonomy appear more valuable than it was. It has reported its findings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office.

Mike Lynch, the founder and former CEO of Autonomy, has rejected HP’s allegations, and accused it of mismanaging the company after the acquisition closed.

RELATED POSTS:

• More From Mike Lynch: HP’s Autonomy Accusations Are Getting Weaker
• Mike Lynch Punches Back at Today’s HP Filing: Whither $5B Writedown?
• HP Confirms DOJ Is Investigating Alleged Fraud in Autonomy Deal
• Yes, There Are Layoffs Pending at HP’s Autonomy Unit in the U.K.
• Former HP CEO Shifts Blame for Autonomy Deal to Chairman
• Dell Passed on Autonomy Before HP Bought It
• Why Mike Lynch Is Playing PR Hardball With HP
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Asks Board to Explain HP Allegations
• Autonomy Founder Lynch Blames Accounting Standards in HP Flap
• The Red Flags That Were Obvious — To Some — In the HP-Autonomy Deal
• Oracle’s Ellison Vindicated in Autonomy PR Flap by HP’s $8.8 Billion Writedown
• Autonomy Founder Mike Lynch Rejects HP Charges, Alleges Mismanagement
• What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
• HP Explains Its $8.8 Billion “Oops”
• HP Beats Street Amid Sales Declines, Takes $8.8 Billion Charge
• HP Names Microsoft Exec Robert Youngjohns to Run Autonomy
• Search Under Way at HP for Autonomy’s Next Chief
• Autonomy’s Mike Lynch Talks About Being HP’s Speedy Tiger Cub (Video)
• Britain’s First Software Billionaire Now Reports to HP CEO Meg Whitman
• Oracle Launches Exalytics Machine, Probably Ending Spat With Autonomy
• Autonomy: When All Else Fails, Blame the Bankers
• Mike Lynch to Oracle: Oh, You Mean Those Slides
• Oracle: You Have a Very Bad Memory, Mr. Lynch
• HP Reportedly Close to $10 Billion Buyout of Autonomy, PC Unit Spinoff
• Will Oracle and Microsoft Bid on Autonomy?

So, instead, watch this video, produced by some of the 120 employees who will lose their jobs:

Give the folks at The Daily (which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.) credit for putting a brave face on things (note brief cameos from Daily EIC Jesse Angelo and publisher Greg Clayman).

But my favorite in this genre remains this 2007 beauty made by the about-to-be-fired staff at AOL France. Hoping we won’t see many more of these, but my hunch is we’ve got more coming soon:

The move, which will mostly affect Motorola’s R&D and consumer mobile device marketing organizations, will eliminate an estimated 500 jobs in South Korea. Once it’s completed, only Motorola’s Home business and a portion of its iDEN operations will continue in Korea. Google described it as a “difficult but necessary decision.”

News of the cuts follows an August regulatory filing from Google that described a restructuring that would eliminate about 4,000 jobs at Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired for $12.5 billion in August of 2011.

“These changes are designed to return Motorola’s mobile devices unit to profitability, after it lost money in fourteen of the last sixteen quarters,” Google said in the filing. “That said, investors should expect to see significant revenue variability for Motorola for several quarters. While lower expenses are likely to lag the immediate negative impact to revenue, Google sees these actions as a key step for Motorola to achieve sustainable profitability.”

A spokesman confirmed that employees received the news this morning. Of the 4,500 people on staff, 400 were handed pink slips. Less than half of the layoffs occurred in the company’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, with a couple dozen taking place in its international offices. As Bloomberg previously reported, Eric Eichmann, the company’s president of its international business unit, is also leaving the company.

The layoffs in D.C. were mostly related to customer service, editorial and administrative functions. Many of the customer service jobs will be relocated to Tucson, Az., where the company opened a call center this summer. Additionally, some employees who were located in some of its smaller markets in the U.S. were let go, but none of the company’s regional offices in Seattle or San Francisco were closed.

Unlike Groupon, LivingSocial is a privately held company, so it’s not always clear how it is doing, but since Amazon owns a large stake in the company, some of its financials are disclosed on a quarterly basis. As evidenced by Amazon’s third-quarter earnings in October, it appeared that LivingSocial was in a real slump.

Amazon reported a quarterly net loss of $274 million, or 60 cents a share, including an impairment charge totaling $169 million, or 37 cents a share. In Q3, LivingSocial reported a $565 million operating loss on revenue of $124 million, and revealed operating expenses of $193 million. In a memo obtained by AllThingsD, CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy explained that most of the losses in the quarter involve non-cash items related to acquisitions made last year that are no longer worth as much. What’s more, for the first time since 2009, LivingSocial had positive operating cash flow.

Still, based on the company’s revenue and operating expenses alone, there appears to be a gap of almost $70 million a quarter that the company will have to account for eventually, either through growing revenue or cutting expenses.

The LivingSocial spokesman said that the decision to make the cuts today was part of a global review of the business; the company is looking to come up with a way to free up resources to make investments in marketing and mobile, while also aligning the cost structure with where the business is today. LivingSocial is also cutting back a new takeout and delivery feature that was launched in 20 markets. One area it is not eliminating is its adventures and events business, which organizes one-off events in cities around the country, ranging from river-rafting trips to wreath-making classes.

The layoffs come as LivingSocial’s biggest competitor faces its own issues. Groupon is struggling to continue its rapid growth, and has watched its stock price tumble 80 percent since going public a year ago. Today, Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason is meeting with the company’s board to determine whether a more seasoned executive is what is needed to run the company going forward.

When the company reports its quarterly results Tuesday morning, it will bring to an ignominious close a fiscal annus horribilis during which there has been precious little good news and utterly no sign of the turnaround in business conditions that CEO Meg Whitman had hoped to bring. In fact, that turnaround now isn’t fully expected before 2016.

Whitman herself summed up a key problem in remarks at a meeting with financial analysts in San Francisco last month. The unprecedented turnover in the CEO’s office — the surprise resignation of Mark Hurd in 2010 after about five years on the job, coupled with the tragicomedy that marred the 11-month tenure of Léo Apotheker — brought on a sudden lack of corporate strategic focus that has wrought significant damage. “My belief is that the single biggest challenge at HP is the changes in the CEOs,” Whitman said that day. “There have been multiple inconsistent plans and executional miscues limiting the speed of recovery.”

Whitman, whose primary managerial bona fides stem from the decade she ran eBay, was supposed to right HP’s listing ship in short order. Instead, what she found was a more complex and fundamental set of business problems that by her own admission will take longer to correct than she originally thought, if indeed they can be corrected at all.

Commentators like myself have struggled to reduce the situation at HP to a crisp metaphor. At one point, HP seemed a battleship making a complex turn. Then it was an aircraft carrier. Yet as the understanding of the scale of HP’s problems have grown, so must the metaphoric imagery. If HP were a ship, Whitman would be trying to steer the world’s largest supertanker, with a damaged engine and only partial control of the rudder, with flooding on the lower decks and several upper decks on fire, all in hostile waters infested by pirates, with a storm brewing.

Last month’s meeting of analysts was meant to reset the expectations of the financial community for exactly how long it will take to finally fix HP, and the news wasn’t encouraging. Earning-per-share profits of $4 per year or higher had been seen as a key barrier that HP couldn’t afford to cross. Yet it did, projecting per-share profits of $3.40 to $3.60 on a non-GAAP basis. Horrified shareholders stormed for the exits, lopping HP’s share price by 13 percent in the process.

So what do the analysts expect from HP’s final report of the bloody fiscal year of 2012? The consensus view calls for HP to report a profit of $1.14 per share on a non-GAAP basis on sales of about $30.5 billion. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities says to expect weak sales of consumer PCs and enterprise servers and even weaker demand for printers than before to all weigh on HP’s results. “We do not see a ‘quick-fix’ for any of these issues and we anticipate ongoing revenue and profitability headwinds for HP in the medium term,” he wrote in a research note issued to clients on Nov. 8.

Well, duh. Here’s exactly how bad Whitmore thinks it could be:

• Revenue will be “light,” and by light he means a miss on the consensus expectation by as much as a billion dollars, and it could be down year on year by as much as 4 percent, led by a decline in the personal systems group that could be as bad as 12 percent year on year. Printer and enterprise revenue might be flat year on year, and that, he argues, is “optimistic.”
• Now for some good news, precious little though there may be: Gross margins may increase slightly to 23.3 percent company-wide, up from 23.2 percent, while operating margins may rise to 10.1 percent versus 9.7 percent a year ago, primarily on cost-cutting and restructuring actions already taken. That good news doesn’t come without some added trouble: The savings from all the cost-cutting are likely going to be offset by new investments to get HP’s IT services business — the company formerly known as EDS — back in reasonable shape. HP took an unprecedented $8 billion impairment charge related to EDS in August, and Whitman has already laid the expected decline in profits in fiscal 2013 at this business unit’s door.
• Expect to see market share losses in specialized servers. The high-end Business Critical Server business, once very profitable, has been hamstrung by doubt brought on by a yearlong and still technically incomplete litigation with software giant Oracle. HP won the first round, though Oracle has promised to appeal a judge’s order that it honor an agreement to continue to port its software to run with HP’s Integrity servers, which use Intel’s Itanium processor. IBM, Whitmore says, has been the primary benefactor of the kerfuffle, gaining share in a declining business. Meanwhile, sales of servers running mainstream x86-based chips aren’t exactly blowing anyone’s hair back.
• And if all that weren’t bad enough, there’s Europe. HP has the highest exposure to Europe of any of the major technology companies, and the continent accounts for about 37 percent of overall revenue. You don’t have to read a newspaper to know there’s trouble in those economies.

So now you know.

(Image via icanhascheezburger.)

Multiple sources confirm to AllThingsD that senior managers are girding their teams for yet another shakeup, though they are saying that the number of jobs that will be eliminated this time around will be much smaller. Some employees are being quietly told by managers that they will lose their jobs in January, but are being kept around for the moment as insurance against the possibility of other key people quitting before then, one source told me.

Another source told me that it’s an open secret around the corridors of AMD’s offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Austin, Texas, that another round of job cuts are coming. “The thinking is that management needs to get a few things right that they didn’t in the last round of layoffs,” one source told me.

It’s unclear exactly how many jobs will be eliminated in the pending reorganization. One source described the target number as “in motion,” in part because AMD managers are waiting to see how many more people quit on their own accord between now and January — and thus don’t require expensive severance packages. “Once the rate of attrition is known, they’ll know how many more they need to fire to get to the final target,” one source told me.

An AMD spokesman didn’t return messages.

Word of yet another shakeup comes only days after a Reuters report saying that AMD has hired investment bank J.P. Morgan to help advise it on strategic options, including a sale of certain assets, or even of the company itself.

AMD took pains, both in external and internal statements, to dispute the notion that a sale is possible in the days and hours after the report. Hours after the Reuters story on Tuesday, AMD issued a carefully worded statement saying that it is “not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets at this time.” Note that the statement addressed nothing about J.P. Morgan’s hiring.

CEO Rory Read took a similar take in an internal memo issued to all AMD employees that day, and shared with AllThingsD.

CONFIDENTIAL-INTERNAL ONLY

To: All AMD

Subject: Media Speculation

Team,

Within the past couple hours, a major media outlet wrote a piece speculating about the sale of AMD. As you know, articles such as this periodically surface in the media. I want you to know exactly how we are responding to this speculative piece, as we expect some additional media outlets to inquire. Our official response is below, along with the original news article.

But let me personally reinforce to you: we are not actively pursuing the sale of AMD or any of our significant assets. It’s full steam ahead with our strategy … we absolutely are on the right path.

Rory

————–

AMD Media Statement
AMD’s board and management believe that the strategy the company is currently pursuing to drive long-term growth by leveraging AMD’s highly-differentiated technology assets is the right approach to enhance shareholder value. AMD is not actively pursuing a sale of the company or significant assets at this time.

The denial didn’t stop anyone from doing some back-of-the-envelope math concerning what AMD might do should its ongoing cash crunch worsen significantly. Vijay Rakesh, an analyst with Sterne Agee, speculated that AMD could make $150 million on a sell/leaseback deal on its corporate real estate in Sunnyvale. Patent sales, he wrote, could net as much as $2.2 billion.

Nor did it stop any speculation about potential buyers, few though they may be. Qualcomm is the most often mentioned candidate, with a private equity buyer coming in a close second. Fortune’s Dan Primack pretty much shut down that idea, quoting a private equity executive who said the very thought of AMD put him in a “cold sweat.”

Meanwhile, another concern is the state of employee morale. While it wouldn’t be the first time that AMD has seen a phase of corporate difficulty — competing with Intel tends to guarantee that — people both inside and outside the company are starting to remark that even for AMD, morale is reaching new lows.

One significant problem is the number of executives who have departed, either for other jobs or who have been fired in either of the two rounds of recent layoffs. Without experienced executives who have seen tough times at AMD before, younger employees are finding it difficult to feel confident that the company can bounce back. As one source put it: “All the old AMD street-fighters are gone, and a lot of them feel that Rory has made a big mistake in getting rid of them. Without them, people feel like they’re in a losing battle.”

Update: So an AMD spokesman just got back to me, saying that another round of restructuring, including cuts, has been on the table since AMD first announced its plan last month. Here’s the statement:

As we communicated during our third quarter earnings results, we expect to take further restructuring actions in the first half of 2013. At that time, we did not know what specifically they would consist of or if they would be material. We have not provided any updates since then and don’t comment on rumor or speculation.

Okay then. So consider it confirmed, or, re-confirmed.