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Intel Layoffs - Marketing Only?

September 1, 2006 |

Intel®The Intel layoffs are going to be announced on Tuesday. There will be a webcast for employees, giving a general overview of what will happen. Employees will be informed by their managers (not by email as some have speculated - even Intel is not that cruel (well, maybe they are, but not when it comes to job cuts). 

The original CNet piece that came out this morning mentioned that the layoffs will mostly affect marketing and everybody and their cat picked up on that. According to the Sacramento Mercury News,

David Wu, an analyst at Global Crown Capital, also expects Intel to cut about 12,000 more employees.

“My guess is they will cut by functions rather than across the board,” he said. “They probably have too many marketing people relative to sales people. I suspect that the engineering teams will not be touched.”

But then the numbers are all over the place (WSJ:20.000, AP doesn’t name numbers, 10.000 has been kicked around, and even 8000 salaried and 8000 hourly employees) and even internally, nobody knows what is going to happen. Heads off to Geekygirl for being the first Intel insider to post about this. Even TinyScreenfuls has been quiet so far (but then his wife just gavebirth), and so has the Unofficial Intel Blog.

I am not sure I buy the comment for David Wu, though, that engineering is not going to be touched. Here is my prediction. There will be some cuts right away next week, but that will only be part of the story. Maybe marketing will be slashed the most, but not only marketing. Of course Intel can’t cut 20.000 engineers/technicians and expect business to continue as normal. There is simply no way that could happen. The disruption would be big and the least Intel needs is a cut in production right now. Instead, there will be other changes that will be implemented over time. Maybe development units will merge, the flash business will be sold, etc. This round of layoffs might affect those on the floor (engineers/techs) less than others for now, but there will be other changes in the next months or so.

Some big cut will come next week, but this is not the end of this story.

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1 Comment so far

  1. JeffreyLin.Net on September 2, 2006 12:00 pm

    My friends at Intel are telling me the job cut will probably be at the higher end of that 10,000-20,000 estimate, and not all job cuts are being publicized so the number would likely be even higher. I’ve talked about some in my post Intel Cuts Jobs out of Embarrassment (http://www.jeffreylin.net/2006/09/02/intel-cuts-jobs-out-of-embarrassm

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