Seagate Technology to cut about 6,500 jobs; stock jumps 22%
latimes.comHow does this affect Seagate's downwards trending quality?
I got this kind of impression from Backblaze durability statistics, personal experiences have also been bad lately.
I do remember time when Seagate meant quality, but that ended when they bought Maxtor.
> "The restructuring is expected to cost the company about $164 million in pre-tax charges during fiscal 2017, $82 million of which will be employee termination costs"
$82000000/6500 = $12615
Average severance of 12.6k per employee seems rough.
Maybe if all of the cuts were in the Bay Area. However the article suggests it's the "manufacturing footprint" in Asia that will be most affected.
Potentially that's not a very bad severance.
I read somewhere that Thailand is currently the world's largest hard drive manufacturer. It is therefore entirely possible that a substantial number of these job cuts with be in Thailand which definitely has dramatically lower salaries than the Bay Area.
source on the Thailand and HDs for those that are interested. This article from 2011 claims that 25% of global HD assembly is in Thailand. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f0f9a234-fb33-11e0-8756-00144feab4...
There's also overhead of managing the terminations, which is likely in that $82m.
They have workers in many countries so it would depend on where they are happening.
Why is the stock up following news of a layoff?
(Honest question, I'm clueless about the financial market)
Because it is a cost cutting measure they are assuming that after the layoffs the company will be selling just as much product but will have 6,500 less salaries to pay making them more profitable.
It's all about short-term savings, and a lot of investors think only short-term. The company will have more money because it won't have to pay all those people.
In the long term, this move will probably hurt the company unless all those workers were unskilled assembly line workers. When I hear such news, I seriously consider selling a stock, because that means the company is likely going to be steadily going downhill over the long term.
Sometimes a company in this situation gets it together and does well for itself again. In that case, it's worth buying the stock again. That's by no means certain, so in my opinion a buy and hold strategy isn't worth it for companies that are conducting layoffs due to financial difficulties.
If the company is having difficulties, which we'd expect with the advent of SSDs as at least in part a disruptive innovation, it can be a sign that management and the board are at least acknowledging the problems. Better than a controlled flight into terrain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain).
For the same reason amazon goes down after they reach their profit targets.
Day trading volume is like 70% automatic. Which means it's basically dumb machines fighting dumb machines, and a bunch of speculators trailing the party.
Wow, that's a really huge number of jobs; hopefully everyone lands on their feet.
They can still become Uber drivers. Welcome to the YCombinator Economy! :)
They won't, though.
If you want to know more, I suggest checking out this site:
https://www.thelayoff.com/seagate-technology
People at my company had said they don't lay people off. I found otherwise on thelayoff, so I check it periodically to see if there's anything to worry about.
It is possible that like Foxconn, they are depending more on robots for their manufacturing. Perhaps they're preparing themselves to be bought out.