Newsgroup: it.economia.borsa
Titolo: Sun licenzia 4400 dipendenti.

Battered by the prolonged slump in information technology spending, Sun
Microsystems Inc. said Thursday that it will slash 4,400 jobs in a bid to
cut costs and become profitable again.
But some analysts wondered if the planned cuts went deep enough to pull the
company out of a hole. The Santa Clara maker of servers that support
corporate customers and Web sites said it plans to reduce its global
workforce by 11 percent to about 35,000.
The company said pink slips will start going out to employees in the United
States in the next few months, but it could take longer for the layoffs to
hit workers in other countries.
"It's a tough decision, but I think it's the right one for us," Chief
Executive Officer Scott McNealy said in a call with analysts. "I don't think
anybody can really predict where the economy is going."
The announcement came as the tech giant posted a $111 million loss (4 cents
per share) on $2.75 billion in revenue in the first fiscal quarter, compared
with a $180 million loss (6 cents) on $2.86 billion in revenue in the
year-ago period.
Minus one-time charges, Sun lost $78 million (2 cents). Wall Street had
estimated a loss of 4 cents per share.
McNealy blamed the tough economy for his company's performance, although he
said Sun has been making gains in new markets, including health care and the
government.
Steve McGowan, Sun's chief financial officer, said the combination of
expansion into new areas and job cuts will allow the company to turn a
profit again by the second half of the current fiscal year, which ends June
30, 2003.
The planned layoffs will include most of the 1,000 jobs Sun had earlier
announced would be cut by the end of the calendar year. The company also cut
3, 900 jobs during in the past fiscal year.
Despite gains in such areas as data storage and information technology
services, analyst Andrew Neff of Bear Stearns described Sun's performance as
"somewhat light" with "not much visibility moving forward." He does not own
Sun stock and his firm has no banking relationship with Sun.
Some Wall Street analysts had projected as many 8,000 job cuts at Sun to
improve earnings.
"I don't think it's deep enough," said analyst Alex Mou of Hotovec, Pomeranz
& Co., who does not own Sun stock, nor does his firm have a banking
relationship with it. "It should be more of a 20 to 25 percent cut.
Obviously, that's a very painful process for McNealy."
Industry analyst Jean Bozman of International Data Corp. said Wall Street
was looking for a more drastic reduction. "A lot of people have been talking
about viability," said Bozman, who does not own Sun stock. "We think it's
about right-sizing the company."
But McNealy argued that deeper cuts could harm Sun's ability to compete and
expand to new markets.
"If we made bigger cuts, we won't be playing in new arenas," he said.
"That's why we're not thrashing our business model. We have flexibility up
and down, moving forward. You don't have that flexibility if you go too far
one way or the other."
And despite criticism that it had not done enough to scale back its spending
on research and development, McGowan said the company plans to maintain its
R&D spending level.
Although the cuts will affect every division at Sun, engineering teams will
be the least affected, he noted.
"We're a products and technology company and R&D is the lifeblood of this
company," he said.
Sun is also expected to post a second-quarter charge of $300 million to
cover the cost of the workforce reduction, a spokeswoman said.
Sun's stock rose 8 cents to $3.07 per share in after-hours trading Thursday.
The stock was up 19 cents per share at the end of regular trading  -  E-mail
Benjamin Pimentel at 
bpim...@sfchronicle.com
.

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