HP shares rose nearly 5 percent to $22.10, up $1.02 as of 11:15 am ET. Investors appear to be showing new confidence in HP and how CEO Meg Whitman is running the show. All the announcements that HP made yesterday bear repeating, because it was a busy afternoon:

 
Update: A few readers have written to point out I was wrong about HP’s old ticker symbol. It wasn’t HP but HWP. Silly me. Even so, if the Compaq name is headed for some lesser level of importance in HP’s future, then perhaps the Q in the ticker symbol, which was added as a nod to Compaq’s old symbol CPQ, to give the impression that the combination was more a merger of equals, should go. Given the choice between them, I would vote for HP. I should stress that I have zero indications that this is even under consideration, and is really just me ruminating.

Analysts had a mixed view. Chris Whitmore of Deutsche Bank Securities has been one of the more skeptical voices on HP’s turnaround prospects. “New sheriff, old game plan,” was the headline on his note to clients today. “We remain cautious on HP’s weak fundamentals, challenging macro conditions and deteriorating cash flow,” he wrote. Despite the beat on earnings, free cash flow — at $1.4 billion in the quarter — declined by half, pointing to what Whitmore calls “very poor earnings quality.” He rates HP as a “sell,” with a $20 price target.

Brent Bracelin of Pacific Crest Securities wrote that he remains unconvinced that an unexpected strength in HP’s PC unit is sustainable. “Apple and Samsung now account for 39 percent of market share across PCs, tablets and smartphones, and have a volume advantage relative to HP’s 6 percent share,” he wrote in a note to clients this morning. He rates the shares “market perform,” or neutral, and worries that HP’s biggest problem is that about half its sales are still tied to PCs and printers.

Whitman took to CNBC this morning to talk about HP’s situation. She portrayed the turnaround under way as about “10 to 15 percent” complete. That means there’s still a lot of work to do ahead. “We’ve laid a lot of pipe and done a lot of groundwork,” Whitman told the network’s anchors in a 13-minute appearance. I’ve embedded it below:

A report by Business Insider yesterday pegged the range of cuts at HP to between 10 percent and 15 percent of its current work force of 320,000 people. But sources familiar with HP’s plans tell AllThingsD that the cuts will be carried out over a relatively long period of time, perhaps a year or more. A report by Bloomberg News out minutes ago puts the target at 25,000. The exact number of cuts, one source told me, is still considered a “moving target” and could grow or shrink.

Additionally, sources say, Whitman will, during a conference call with analysts, portray the cuts as necessary — not to bolster HP’s earnings and satisfy shareholders, but rather as a means to make needed investments. On this point, Whitman will be borrowing a bit from the playbook of her short-lived predecessor, former HP CEO Léo Apotheker.

Whitman will argue that many of the cuts made at HP during the five years that Mark Hurd was at its helm were made without corresponding investments in new and growing initiatives. This “cut and reinvest” theme will apply across the company, sources tell me. The process has been an intense one among HP’s senior executive ranks and has, as one source put it, “consumed the company.”

Much like what happened at networking giant Cisco Systems, the restructuring will include a combination of voluntary retirement packages, the precise details of which are still under consideration, combined with outright cuts. The target for voluntary retirement, sources tell me, is about 5,000 people.

Brian Marshall, an analyst with ISI, in a May 3 note to clients estimated that a job reduction of about 18,000, amounting to about 5 percent of HP’s work force would, would save HP in the neighborhood of $1.2 billion and boost year-end earnings per share by about 50 cents, assuming a cost of about $100,000 per employee. “If HP institutes a reduction in force as we expect, we wouldn’t be surprised if calendar year 2013 EPS estimates eventually approach $5.00 as the business stabilizes, growth returns in the Jan 2013 quarter and the organization is streamlined,” Marshall wrote.

Patterson’s departure was first reported by Betabeat and confirmed by a Jetsetter spokeswoman, who added that he was asked to step down because of staffing issues and low morale — not because of the company’s operations.

Clearly, there are signs of trouble in paradise: This time, pretty pictures of luxurious vacations in exotic locations like Turks & Caicos can’t cover up what’s really going on at the New York-based start-up. Prior to Patterson’s departure, a handful of executives left, including Jetsetter’s chief marketing officer, Barry Herstein; VP of merchandising and operations Heather Leisman; and former head of marketing Stephanie Dolgins, Betabeat reported.

Rob Deeming, who has been at Gilt for the past three years, and recently was in charge of opening Jetsetter’s U.K. office, will become acting general manager.

Betabeat, which interviewed Gilt’s CEO Kevin Ryan about the executive shake-up, also reported that the travel division has faced other problems with getting its international operations up and running, and that it was burning a ton of cash. However, the company claims that Jetsetter is on track to record $100 million in gross bookings this year, and to be profitable next year.

This is not the first internal shake-up at Gilt Groupe, which earlier this year trimmed roughly 10 percent of its employees, including some of its management team. At the time, Ryan downplayed the situation by saying that the cuts were designed to get the company to cash-flow positive by the second quarter, and profitable by the fourth quarter. But other reports painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

Prior to Jetsetter, Patterson was part of the founding team at Kayak, where he was VP of marketing.

Getty Images News | Justin Sullivan

Here we go again. After just four months, Yahoo has taken the CEO reins from Scott Thompson and passed them to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, marking the fifth change in the company’s top job in the past four years. During this time, the company’s market cap has deteriorated from $28.53 billion at the end of June 2008 to $19.04 billion today, clearly indicating what the revolving CEO suite and associated roller coaster has done to shareholder confidence. But what about the impact on the 13,300 people employed by Yahoo?¹ Clearly, this is something the Yahoo board of directors and Levinsohn — however interim he is — must address, if they hope to achieve a turnaround.

Think about it: Yahoo employees who have weathered multiple rounds of layoffs have also had to adapt to the frequently changing leadership tides created by the revolving door at the top of the company: Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Timothy Morse, Scott Thompson, and now Ross Levinsohn. Not surprisingly, this has impacted Yahoo employees’ faith in senior leadership over time.

According to social jobs and career site Glassdoor, morale at Yahoo has softly teetered from quarter to quarter. On a five-point scale, employees have given the company a high rating of 4.3 (satisfied) in the first quarter of 2008 to a low of 3.0 in the second quarter of 2009; however, the rating has settled around 3.4 (okay), for the most part.

However, the employee sentiment surrounding how well each Yahoo CEO has led the company has had a much more turbulent path. When Carol Bartz started off, she had a 91 percent approval rating in her first quarter, but by her last quarter on the job, it sank to just 33 percent. For Thompson, it was too short to tell if his 48 percent approval was a starting-off point based on employee satisfaction, or if it was his personal high note.

Evidence of this employee turmoil, along with a desire for more direction and stability, can be found in many of the anonymous reviews left by Yahoo employees on Glassdoor in recent months:

As one Yahoo senior financial analyst comments, “Develop a clear strategy, and stick to it! Way too much disparity in communicating what it is the company stands for.”

A Yahoo principal engineer adds, “The lack of vision is really astounding … Executive management should try better communicating with senior management and solicit their input when making such major personnel changes. There should be clear strategic goals conveying what is trying to be accomplished.”

Another Yahoo employee notes that Yahoo “lacks a clear vision of what the company is all about. The sooner they figure this out, the sooner they can focus their resources in the right direction.”

Employees know the company best. As a leader, you may think you know, hear and understand your company’s challenges, but if you fail to listen to your employees and therefore fail to address those challenges, you will likely find the road to growth and change within the company tougher than expected.

Now, perhaps more than ever, Yahoo’s executives and board should listen to and focus on what’s at the heart of the company: Its employees. Some proven strategies that can support stabilization and rebuilding the business include:

Leadership must extend beyond one title or one person. There are a lot of executives on the Yahoo management team beyond interim head Levinsohn, some of whom have extensive tenure with the company, including co-founder David Filo. This team needs to quickly build consensus on strategic priorities and collectively own responsibility to make sure this is communicated and understood by the entire Yahoo employee population. The new permanent CEO should build on this foundational direction, not deviate from it or completely change it.

Define your vision, stick with it and repeat. Where the company is headed should be articulated in one clear, crisp statement, and as CEO or as a senior leader, it should be used and touched on routinely in all communications, both internally and externally. There is a lot to get done as a leader; there is a lot to convey. But without purpose and vision, efforts to move a business forward will fall flat.

Don’t mistake perks for culture. In the Valley, where talent wars are fierce, we often regard perks as synonymous with culture. While a hefty paycheck, bonuses and other perks like free food, on-site dry cleaning or on-campus childcare may help recruit top talent, they don’t do much to retain talent the way a solid and positive culture does. A good culture takes time, and emanates from a work environment that provides room for — and rewards — creative thinking, and allows opinions to be heard and to be challenged.

Get personal. I suspect that the trust level of senior management has been seriously compromised, and this last blow regarding Thompson’s degree has hurt whatever trust was left. It’s going to be a tough road ahead for Levinsohn and his succession when it comes to winning the hearts of employees. But Yahoo’s senior leadership can make it right, if they make it personal and swing for the fences in communication by hosting small group meetings and by truly showing that management is listening to the wishes, desires and dreams that employees have for the company and for themselves.

This is another critical juncture for Yahoo. With the board and management team in transition, it is especially important that time and resources be dedicated to rebuilding a new social contract with Yahoo employees around the world. Employees come to work every day and vote with their feet for the company to succeed, and it’s the responsibility of senior leadership to work on bringing together the troops to get the company back on track.

Rusty Rueff is a corporate and philanthropic board director, career and workplace expert consultant and writer, as well as start-up company adviser and investor. He currently serves on the corporate boards of Glassdoor, the leading social jobs and career community, and HireVue.com, a video interviewing platform designed to improve the recruiting process. Rusty is also the co-author of “Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business” (Prentice Hall, 2006).

Startup Grind, which first reported the layoffs, said between 500 and 1,000 employees will be affected, representing between 5 percent and 10 percent of the game-publisher’s workforce.

In an emailed statement to All Things D, the company said: “EA is growing and looking to hire hundreds of people for our digital, console, mobile and social games. Like all game companies, we make occasional adjustments to resize teams as projects are completed and new priorities are established. Overall, we expect that headcount will be up at the end of this year.”

Our sources indicate that the layoffs will be closer to 500 and are tied to the company’s game schedule. Last year, the company shipped two epic projects: Battlefield 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic, which were challenging Activision’s respective dominance in first-person shooters and massively multiplayer online categories.

Once a title shifts, some employees stay on to work on other projects or remain on teams that build new content for the existing games to keep them fresh.

In this case, it appears the cuts show just how many resources the company was investing in these titles before launch. We expect to hear about these titles’ performance in a couple weeks when EA reports fourth-quarter earnings.

Three years ago, the company conducted a larger restructuring, totaling 1,500 employees.

Still, the Redwood City, Calif., company has aggressive hiring plans. Previously, it disclosed it wants to hire 5,000 engineers by the end of the decade to help build a platform, crossing all of its labels, including mobile, social and console. In particular, CTO Rajat Taneja has been bulking up his team since joining EA in October and now has 600 people on staff.

In afternoon trading, EA’s stock was down more than 5 percent, or 89 cents, to trade at $15.29 a share. Over the past year, it has traded as high as $26 a share.

In his first news conference since succeeding Howard Stringer as chief executive of Sony, Hirai confirmed the company will sack 10,000 employees — roughly 6 percent of its global workforce — as it moves to refocus its efforts on three main businesses: Mobile devices, cameras and camcorders, and games.

“Now is the time for Sony to change,” Hirai said at the company’s Tokyo headquarters as he detailed his “One Sony” initiative. “We must accelerate the speed of our management, reform our business portfolio, and innovate.”

And to achieve that? First, an ugly employee bloodletting and a rejiggering of the company’s television business, which has racked up $10 billion in losses in the past eight years. Hirai says he aims to cut the division’s fixed costs by 60 percent and its operating costs by 30 percent over the next two years. Meanwhile, Sony will expand its PlayStation and online games business and push into new markets like medical equipment.

“Our goal at Sony is to become a company that creates products and services that stimulate curiosity in customers around the world and gives them an emotional experience,” Hirai said. “I am determined to transform and revive Sony. This is our only chance to change. We cannot shy away from difficult decisions.”

The cuts could run through the two fiscal years until March 2014, although the final timing has not been settled, the people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Analysts had been forecasting a grim quarter for some time now, and RIM did them proud, soundly missing estimates for the fifth time in a row and announcing plans to stop issuing guidance as well.

And as if that weren’t enough, former co-CEO Jim Balsillie has resigned from RIM’s board, and its CTO and COO are stepping down.

What a train wreck.

For its latest quarter, RIM reported a net loss of $125 million, or 24 cents a share, compared to net income of $934 million, or $1.78 per share, for the same period last year. Earnings on an adjusted basis were 80 cents a share for the period. And revenue slipped 25 percent to $4.19 billion.

Analysts had expected RIM to post earnings of 83 cents a share on revenue of $4.56 billion for the period, so this was an ugly miss. Making matters worse, BlackBerry shipments were just 11.1 million units for the past quarter, well below what many analysts had been hoping for, and at the lower end of RIM’s own guidance. The company said it shipped about 500,000 PlayBooks, which is more than it shipped last quarter, but still disappointing.

Today’s earnings were the first reported under the leadership of CEO Thorsten Heins, who took over from co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis in late January. And while Heins at first seemed like he would simply follow his predecessors’ lead, he’s clearly bringing a more critical eye to the company.

In RIM’s earnings statement today, Heins said that while the company has many opportunities, it also has a daunting few quarters ahead of it.

“The business challenges we face over the next several quarters are significant, and I am taking the necessary steps to address them,” he said. “In addition to delivering the BlackBerry 10 platform and refocusing resources on RIM’s key opportunities, such as BlackBerry Mobile Fusion and new integrated service offerings, we will also drive greater operational performance through a variety of initiatives, including increased management accountability and process discipline. In parallel, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of strategic opportunities, including partnerships and joint ventures, licensing and other ways to leverage RIM’s assets and maximize value for our stakeholders.”

No doubt Heins will have quite a bit more to say during RIM’s earnings call. Check out Ina Fried’s liveblog for coverage of that.

The world’s largest electronics chain by revenue said it would close 50 big-box stores this year, test remodeled store formats in San Antonio and Minneapolis, and lay off 400 corporate and support workers as part of a plan to trim $800 million in costs and restructure its ailing business.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

“Yesterday, T-Mobile made the sad announcement that it would be closing seven call centers, laying off thousands of workers, and that more layoff announcements may follow,” Jim Cicconi, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of External and Legislative Affairs said in a lengthy blog post.

Cicconi said that the company wouldn’t normally comment on such matters.

“But I feel this is an exception for one big reason — only a few months ago AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved,” he said. “We also predicted that if the merger failed, T-Mobile would be forced into major layoffs.”

The corporate “I told you so” continues on for some time, and it’s worth a read, so it’s posted below.

That said, much of regulators’ concern about the deal was its effect on competition for consumers, rather than the jobs issue.

Here’s the full text of Cicconi’s statement:

“Yesterday, T-Mobile made the sad announcement that it would be closing seven call centers, laying off thousands of workers, and that more layoff announcements may follow. Normally, we’d not comment on something like this. But I feel this is an exception for one big reason– only a few months ago AT&T promised to preserve these very same call centers and jobs if our merger was approved. We also predicted that if the merger failed, T-Mobile would be forced into major layoffs.

“At that time, the current FCC not only rejected our pledges and predictions, they also questioned our credibility. The FCC argued that the merger would cost jobs, not preserve them, and that rejecting it would save jobs. In short, the FCC said they were right, we were wrong, and did so in an aggressive and adamant way.

“Rarely are a regulatory agency’s predictive judgments proven so wrong so fast. But for the government’s decision, centers now being closed would be staying open, workers now facing layoffs would have job guarantees, and communities facing turmoil would have security. Only a few months later, the truth of who was right is sadly obvious.

“So what’s the lesson here? For one thing, it’s a reminder of why “regulatory humility” should be more than a slogan. The FCC may consider itself an expert agency on telecom, but it is not omniscient. And when it ventures far afield from technical issues, and into judgments about employment or predictions about business decisions, it has often been wildly wrong. The other lesson is even more important, and should be sobering. It is a reminder that in government, as in life, decisions have consequences. One must approach them not as an exercise of power but instead of responsibility, because, as I learned in my years of public service, the price of a bad decision is too often paid by someone else.”

Some 600 workers lost their jobs, most of them in divisions not related to game development. Blizzard says the World of Warcraft development team will not be impacted, despite continued subscriber losses. WoW lost well over a million and a half players last year.

Ugly news, but Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime said in a post to the WoW forums that the company needs to better manage its resources to continue to drive its gaming business. Which is exactly what it plans to do.

“We remain committed to shipping multiple games this year,” Morhaime said. “Our development teams in particular remain largely unaffected by today’s announcement. We’re continuing to develop, iterate, and polish Blizzard DOTA, Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, as well as other, unannounced projects.”

This would be the second round of cuts in the webOS group. The first came in September and affected about 500 people, bringing the total to about 775 since former CEO Léo Apotheker announced HP’s intention to end production of webOS hardware, after sales at Best Buy and other retailers failed to gain traction.

The webOS business has been a particularly difficult subject at HP. The company acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010 under former CEO Mark Hurd. In a November filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, HP said about half of a $3.3 billion in write-down came in the webOS unit.

HP just issued the following statement on the subject and it appears that some will get a chance to be redeployed elsewhere within the company. But make no mistake, most of those affected are being laid off:

“As webOS continues the transition from making mobile devices to open source software, it no longer needs many of the engineering and other related positions that it required before. This creates a smaller and more nimble team that is well-equipped to deliver an open source webOS and sustain HP’s commitment to the software over the long term.

HP is working to redeploy employees affected by these changes to other roles at the company.”

The cuts come after two key events in the webOS group’s recent history. One was the departure of former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, which was first reported by AllThingsD on Jan. 27.

Before that came the decision, announced in December by HP CEO Meg Whitman, to take the webOS software that Palm had developed and turn it into an open source project.

Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701, an IBM employee advocacy group, reports that upward of 800 1,000 workers have been let go this week, with more to follow.

Most of the job cuts appear to be within the U.S., with a high concentration in IBM’s Global Technology Services outsourcing unit.

Alliance@IBM national director Lee Conrad puts the current tally of layoffs at 1,148, and says it’s offshoring that’s driving the reductions. “Those jobs are moving offshore, which seems to be the trend at IBM,” Conrad told AllThingsD. “This is a further abandonment of the U.S. workforce. When IBM talks about rebalancing, what they really mean is moving jobs from the States to overseas.”

IBM did not respond to a request for comment.

Cisco’s recent history is peppered with instances of missed quarters that deliver on results but offer poor outlook. After a restructuring that saw the company cut 6,500 jobs, kill its consumer-oriented products, sell off its Mexico-based manufacturing operations to China’s Foxconn and recalibrate its long-term growth expectations with the financial community, the pressure is on Cisco and its CEO John Chambers to show that the changes were not only for the better, but that they’re taking hold.

Cisco is supposedly back in fighting trim. A new ad campaign, coupled with aggressive strategies in new market areas like cloud computing, coupled with a pivot away from unsuccessful consumer products, suggest that the company is back on track. But can the apparent progress made last quarter stick?

Analysts are expecting a profit of 43 cents a share on sales of $11.23 billion. Analyst Sanjiv Wadhwani of Stifel Nicolaus expects the results to come in slightly better than that. Writing in a research note to clients last week, he checked Cisco’s channel and found that sales of switching products, weak in recent quarters, appears on track to better than expected. Router sales appeared stronger versus competitors, specifically Juniper, despite a relatively weak environment for IT spending overall.

Geographically, spending in the U.S. was steady and, surprisingly, so was spending in Europe, except for in southern European countries like Greece and Italy, were the sovereign debt crisis has been so acute.

Weaknesses will be apparent, Wadhwani says, in sales of set-top boxes, suffering, in part, because of the shortage of hard drives as a result of the flooding in Thailand. Gross margins, a key metric of profitability, may be down slightly in part of a large sale of aggressively priced routers to China. One bright spot of note: During the quarter, Cisco announced that its Unified Computing System — its cloud computing hardware offering — has reached 10,000 customers and is, roughly, a $1 billion business.

Wadhwani says he expects Chambers to set a positive tone in his guidance. “As far as orders are concerned, feedback has been generally positive and consequently we expect the company to provide solid guidance for April. We also expect a positive tone from CEO John Chambers with optimism about the U.S. leading the world in an economic recovery.” That would be a nice change from the depressing results announced a year ago.

The three affected plants focus on smartphone production, and Nokia said it planned to shift much of that work to Asia, in order to be closer to its suppliers and speed up the time it takes to get products ready. Nokia will continue to do some customization work at all three plants.

“With the planned changes, our factories at Komarom, Reynosa and Salo will continue to play an important role serving our smartphone customers,” Nokia Executive VP Niklas Savander said in a statement. “They give us a unique ability to both provide customization and be more responsive to customer needs.”

The cuts will be phased in through the end of the year.

Nokia, of course, is in the midst of a major transformation, as it makes Windows Phone its primary operating system, shifting away from its homegrown Symbian OS.

The company previously announced other rounds of job cuts, including one related to the closure of a plant in Romania.

Earlier this month, Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan downplayed rumors that the New York-based company was undergoing a massive restructuring.

He said that nearly all of Gilt Groupe’s 900 employees and business units would remain intact, despite reports that painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

Today, Ryan confirmed that the final tally ended up being from 80 to 90 people, and that John Auerbach, who headed Park & Bond, its men’s full-priced apparel site, and Nathan Richardson, who ran Gilt City, would both be leaving, after a transition period.

All of the cuts are designed to get the company to cash flow positive by the second quarter, and profitable by the fourth quarter, Ryan said.

Additionally, Ryan said that Richardson and Auerbach, who was Gilt’s fifth employee, are leaving because both are better suited for running start-ups.

“I will be their No. 1 reference,” he said.

An internal memo announcing the departures is expected to be sent around later this afternoon.

On Friday, the cuts focused on Gilt City, the company’s daily deals site that, despite its high-end focus, was competing head to head with others, such as Groupon, LivingSocial and the many other clones in the market.

Ryan said there will be a lot of consolidation in the daily deals space going forward, but that in certain markets it remains a good business for the company, including New York, which is its most profitable division.

“I think you’ll end up with a smaller group of companies. There will be a couple of high-end players, like ourselves and Bloomspot, and then there will be a couple of verticals, like restaurants or kids, and that’s it,” he said.

As part of Friday’s cuts, the company confirmed that it will no longer have offices in Seattle, Dallas and Atlanta. Additional offices it gained through the acquisition of BuyWithMe, including San Diego, Houston and Philadelphia, will also close.

Customers in those markets will receive national deals, but only local deals that are sourced through a centralized sales team. Going forward, Gilt will have offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Washington, D.C.

Earlier this month, Ryan had said he had only expected to lay off about 50 staffers, much less than the rumored 170.

On Friday, New York Magazine reported that more than 100 people were laid off, naming both Richardson and Auerbach as departing executives. It also reported that staffers, who once received a fridge full of snacks, would no longer have a daily supply of fruit, yogurt, cheese and Pellegrino water.

Over the past year, the company expanded quickly beyond its roots as a flash sales site, adding Park & Bond, Gilt City and Gilt Taste, a high-end grocery site. It continues to be in about seven businesses.

Some of the areas that were also restructured were the newer sites, like Gilt Taste and Park & Bond, which Ryan said took more resources to get up and running than it took to run on a day-to-day basis.

Gilt, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013, Ryan added.

Ryan called AllThingsD this morning to clear the air after a report in BetaBeat painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

BetaBeat reported this morning that as many as 170 employees would be laid off today; that Gilt Taste, the company’s high-end grocery site, was likely to be closed down; and that Jetsetter, its travel operations, was likely to be merged with Gilt City, its daily deal division.

On pretty much all accounts, Ryan declared not guilty.

“We are not closing down any businesses. We are not closing down Gilt Taste, and we aren’t merging Gilt City and Jetsetter,” he said.

Additionally, another new division, Park & Bond, which sells full-priced men’s clothing, is also doing well. “In its fifth month of business, Park & Bond did more revenue than any other business in its fifth month,” Ryan added.

The one grain of truth in all of it, he said, is that over the next couple of months, he expects to selectively trim staff by roughly 50 employees.

But for emphasis, he added, the company will still end up having more employees by the end of March than it does now.

“It’s pretty minimal in the scheme of having 900 employees,” he said. “Not only will we do that [have cutbacks], but we will continue to do that. What Gilt needs to be, and is doing, is to create a fantastic consumer experience while running an efficient company.”

He said the company achieved its goal of generating $500 million in June and now is setting its sights on transitioning the business from a money-losing organization to cash-flow break even this year.

He also said that Gilt Groupe, which raised $138 million in capital last May, is on track for an IPO, perhaps as early as the fourth quarter, but more likely in 2013.

“The timing feels about right, and we are on a steady progression,” said Ryan, who declined to give revenue estimates for this year because the company is in the sensitive lead-up to a public offering.

Ryan named two divisions that may see cuts over the next couple of months: Gilt Taste and Gilt City.

In October, Gilt City purchased BuyWithMe, and although it hired only 20-25 of the deal provider’s 190 employees, Ryan said they probably don’t need that many going forward now that the integration has been completed.

Additionally, he said there are some inefficiencies within Gilt Taste.

Ryan characterized the site as “doing great,” but said it will need fewer staffers now that it is up and running. At first, it needed to negotiate deals with dozens of vendors and shoot photos of the more than 1,000 products on the site.

Now that they’ve hit a baseline of items, they’ll probably add only a couple hundred new products a year, reducing the need for so much staff.

“There’s much less work to do there,” Ryan said. “With flash sales, you have to do that process every week, but in the full-priced business, there’s greater start-up costs. That’s part of the business.”

In particular, BetaBeat said Park & Bond President John Auerbach was likely to leave the company.

Ryan said there’s always the chance one of the top 15 executives could leave, whether it was their decision or the company’s, but that Auerbach is still working there as of now.

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between Finland’s Nokia Corp. and Germany’s Siemens AG, had 74,000 employees on Nov. 1.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The job cuts will hit the company globally and will be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2012, the company said in a statement. The company says the move will reduce operating expenses by $118 million in 2012 and by $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The cuts will amount to about 1,400 of AMD’s 12,000-strong workforce. What you’ll read elsewhere is that AMD is suffering from a worldwide slowdown in PCs, caused in large part by the growth of Apple’s iPad business and to a lesser extent other tablets. But it’s a little more complicated than that when you consider that AMD’s share of the market actually grew slightly in the second quarter, according to the latest numbers I have from Mercury Research, which tracks the market share between the two chipmakers. As of August, AMD was running a 19.4 percent share of the PC and server business, up from 18.2 percent in the first quarter, while Intel’s share dropped slightly from 81 percent in the first quarter to 79.9 percent in the second. Those fractions of a percentage point actually matter to both companies.

The bigger problem is that AMD is nowhere in tablets or smart phones and that was one of the reasons that Read was brought in to replace Dirk Meyer, who surprised everyone by resigning after a fight with his board of directors in January.

In the meantime, expect AMD to make a big fuss about server chips in the coming weeks.

AMD’s statement is below.

AMD Optimizes Cost Structure to Enhance Competitiveness and Accelerate Growth

Operational Savings of More Than $200 Million in 2012 Designed to Accelerate Future Growth in Lower Power, Emerging Markets and the Cloud

SUNNYVALE, CA–(Marketwire -11/03/11)- AMD (NYSE: AMD – News) today announced a restructuring plan and implementation of operational efficiency initiatives designed to strengthen the company’s competitive positioning. AMD expects that these combined actions will create a more competitive cost structure and rebalance the company’s global workforce skillsets, helping AMD to continue delivering industry-leading products while improving productivity, reducing time-to-market and better aligning with key industry trends that are expected to drive growth.

“Reducing our cost structure and focusing our global workforce on key growth opportunities will strengthen AMD’s competitiveness and allow us to aggressively pursue a balanced set of strategic activities designed to accelerate future growth,” said Rory Read, AMD president and CEO. “The actions we are taking are designed to improve our ability to consistently address the needs of our global customer base and stake leadership positions in lower power, emerging markets and the cloud.”

AMD expects that the restructuring plan will result in operational savings, primarily in operating expenses, of approximately $10 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 and $118 million in 2012, primarily through a reduction of its global workforce by approximately 10% and the termination of existing contractual commitments. The workforce reduction will occur across all functions globally and is expected to be substantially completed by the end of the first quarter of 2012. Based on anticipated savings from the restructuring plan, AMD expects fourth quarter 2011 operating expenses will be approximately $610 million.

As a result of implementing efficiencies across the company’s operations, AMD expects to save approximately $90 million in 2012 operating expenses in addition to the restructuring plan savings, resulting in more than $200 million of expected combined operational savings in 2012.

The company expects to reinvest a significant portion of the savings to fund initiatives designed to accelerate AMD’s strategies for lower power, emerging markets, and the cloud.

The company’s actions pursuant to the restructuring plan will take place primarily during fourth quarter of 2011, with some restructuring plan activities extending into 2012. The company currently estimates that it will record restructuring expense in the fourth quarter of 2011 and in 2012 of approximately $101 million and $4 million, respectively. Of the total restructuring expense, approximately $56 million will be future cash expenditures in 2011, $33 million will be future cash expenditures in 2012 and $15 million will be future cash expenditures in 2013.

About AMD
AMD (NYSE: AMD – News) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its groundbreaking AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that power a wide range of computing devices. AMD’s server computing products are focused on driving industry-leading cloud computing and virtualization environments. AMD’s superior graphics technologies are found in a variety of solutions ranging from game consoles, PCs to supercomputers. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

As a result, Motorola will take a net pre-tax charge to earnings of approximately $31 million. Of that, $27 million will be related to severance costs and $4 million to facility exit costs.

“Both of the Company’s business segments (the Mobile Devices business and the Home business), as well as various corporate functions, are impacted by the action and the action affects employees globally,” Motorola said the filing.

Motorola still expects the Google deal to close by late 2011 or early 2012, the same target date it set when the companies announced the acquisition in August.

Jason Calacanis

The layoffs eliminated 18 employees, leaving Mahalo with a headcount of 49, Rapp said. They happened on Oct. 5.

These aren’t the first layoffs for Mahalo. The company had 102 employees in February of this year before making layoffs spurred by Google’s “Panda” update, which downgraded content designed to rank highly in search results. Mahalo was even larger a few years ago when it focused on building its own search alternative, Rapp said.

Rapp noted that while Mahalo’s videos get 30 million views per month, they are not necessarily profitable based on YouTube ads. Educational iPad apps, by contrast, seem to be instant money makers, because users will pay for them. Mahalo plans to gear up to release one app per week, though it only has four out so far. It will also continue to make educational videos.

Mahalo, which is backed by Sequoia Capital, News Corp. and CBS, soon plans to move its headquarters to Culver City from Santa Monica, Rapp said, and it has $5 million of funding in the bank to fuel its shift to instructional content.

Calacanis photo by Flickr user eirikso.

In a Thursday memo to staff, the executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, and others said that “no matter how many people do or do not raise their hands,” no one in the newsroom would be laid off as a result of the buyout program. The memo also said the Times reserves “the right to turn down some volunteers who are in those areas of the newsroom where we feel we cannot reduce our numbers.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »