Seagate cuts jobs again

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate plans to cut a total of 6,500 jobs before the end of fiscal year 2017, about 14 percent of its total workforce. At the end of June, it was already announced that the company would cut 1600 jobs in the US, although this was not confirmed by Seagate at the time.

It has not been announced which departments will be responsible for the layoffs. Seagate does write that it will continue to merge business units across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.

Furthermore, Seagate reports that it has sold approximately 37 million hard drives in the past year, equivalent to about 62 exabytes and an average storage capacity per drive of 1.7 terabytes, selling for an average of $67. This resulted in a total turnover of about 2.65 billion dollars for the company.

The operation to lay off 6,500 people will cost the company a total of about $164 million. Seagate has been restructuring for some time due to declining sales, partly caused by competition from flash storage. Another factor is that the PC market has been shrinking for five consecutive quarters.

It is the second round of layoffs at Seagate in a year. Last September, more than a thousand jobs were lost in an effort to cut costs. The number of layoffs in the US was already announced on June 29 via a government document.