Wow, this really comes as a surprise for my ex-employer. I knew that business is bad at this financial crisis moment and orders and volume have dropped drastically, but it's not only Seagate is affected. In fact all US companies in the electronics sectors are suffering due to the global financial meltdown. I still got keep in touch with some of my ex-colleagues and have been told that the volumes and productions have gone down by a lot, but this is very much expected and there's no sign at all that both the CEO and COO are gonna be relieved their duties. The CEO, Bill Watkins was bullish at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last Friday and he was mourning about the worse Dec month Seagate is going through. According to him, VR and retrenchment were to be announced soon (latest by the end of Jan 09). However, no hints were given by him during the interview held at the show that he, as well as COO Dave Wickersham were part of the layoff. Below were the reports of the surprise announcement of the Seagate restructuring taken from Tech Trader Daily:
In a stunning development in the disk-drive business, Seagate (STX) this morning announced that its board has ousted Bill Watkins as President and CEO, and replaced him with Stephen Luczo, the company’s chairman.
In a filing with the SEC, the company also said it will cut about 10% of its U.S. workforce as part of a restructuring program to be detailed later this month. Seagate said that the restructuring will impact a broad range of departments, including R&D, and comes in response to the current economic environment.
The company said Watkins will be advising Luczo in order to ensure a smooth transition, and will confer over the next week to determine what role if any Watkins will have at the company going forward.
The company also disclosed that David Wickersham as resigned as president and chief operating officer, effective today. He will be replaced by Robert Whitmore, the chief technology officer at the company.
Let's hope that the new management and board of directors can work together to bring Seagate back up to the sustainable level. At this moment, they still haven't announce their global strategy of Seagate in other part of the world in terms of cost saving (VSS, layoff, hiring, pay cut, shutdown and etc...) and there are many rumours flying around regarding what Penang Seagate employee will be getting. Let's hope my friends and ex-colleague there can go through this difficult period with not much b ad impact.
In fact, many companies in the Bayan Lepas free trade zone are not doing good. For example, Spansion production will be shutting down for the month of January from what I heard from my boss, my own company will be shutting down 1 week during CNY, Bosch just gave out letters to 40 of it's employees telling them to stop work for 3 months (with half months pay every month) and many more companies are taking measures to survive in these difficult times... :(
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