Aug 20, 2001 Determined to put a stop to its losses amid a worldwide electronics slump, Japanese manufacturer Fujitsu is slashing 9% of its global work force.
Fujitsu will cut 16,400 jobs from its work force of 180,000, president Naoyuki Akikusa said Monday. About 11,400 of the job cuts will be at overseas operations.
Fujitsu did not give a breakdown by country but said about 5,000 jobs in electronic devices and other sectors will be cut in Asia outside Japan and nearly 3,000 telecommunications jobs will be cut in North America.
It was not clear where the remaining 3,400 overseas job cuts would come from.
In Japan, Fujitsu will eliminate 5,000 jobs, half by retirement. The other half will come by eliminating jobs held by workers sent in from affiliated companies. All the cuts will be carried out by March 2002.
"The needs of the market are changing very rapidly," Akikusa told reporters. "We need to adopt a global perspective."
Fujitsu will make its plant in Gresham, Ore., which employs 860 workers, a 50-50 joint venture with U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, officials said. Fujitsu has several plants in the United States.
The big challenge for Fujitsu is turning profits during a global slowdown and breaking away from its dependence on U.S. demand, the officials said.
Fujitsu, based in Tokyo, lost $460 million in the quarter that ended in June and the company forecasts losses for this fiscal year. It has already booked a one-time charge of $2.5 billion for restructuring costs for fiscal 2001.
Like its Japanese rivals, Fujitsu has been hit by the global downturn in the demand for chips and other electronics products.
NEC Corp. is slashing 4,000 jobs - about half workers from subcontractors. The total includes 1,800 regular NEC employees, or 1.2% of the company's global work force.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., long famous for its Japanese system of lifetime employment, has announced a voluntary early retirement plan to try to coax several thousand of its Japanese group workers to quit.
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