The future of workers at tech giant Intel remains in the air, with around thousands of job cuts still to be confirmed.
The company has revealed that it is “more than halfway to our workforce reduction target”, despite announcing a massive layoff of 15,000 employees back on August 1st and claiming to be acting with urgency to execute the plan.
In addition to the staff cuts, Intel is also in the process of reducing the size of its global real estate portfolio. Both sets of changes are necessary, Intel says, to make the company leaner and more efficient.
“Difficult Decisions to Make”
The update came in a press release from Intel titled: ‘A message from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to employees regarding the next phase of Intel’s transformation’.
In it, Gelsinger says that he wished to address rumors and speculations about the company following a recent Board of Directors meeting.
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The lengthy missive begins in an upbeat manner, praising on the “highly productive” meeting but acknowledging the need to “drive greater efficiency, improve our profitability and enhance our market competitiveness”.
After reporting on strategic goals around collaborations with Amazon Web Services, $3 billion of award funding, the Intel Foundry business and its AI investments, Gelsinger then came to the topic of the company’s ‘workforce reduction target’.
Reiterating the target to lose 15,000 workers by the end of the year – more than 10% of its estimated global workforce of around 130,000 – he noted that Intel had “difficult decisions to make and will notify impacted employees in the middle of October”.
“Through our voluntary early retirement and separation offerings, we are more than halfway to our workforce reduction target of approximately 15,000 by the end of the year.” – Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel
Intel’s Significant Transformation
Intel began a series of staff reductions and salary cuts last year, blaming the weak economy and a dip in revenue for the efficiency drive. But the 15,000 cut announced in August escalated the plans dramatically.
The job cuts are backed up by Intel’s plans to reduce or exit about two-thirds of its real estate globally by the end of 2024. And, in a further effort to “improve our balance sheet and liquidity”, the company is proceeding to sell its stake in logic product manufacturer Altera; it originally spent $16.7 billion on the acquisition in 2015.
Gelsinger said in his post that the changes Intel is making marks the company’s “most significant transformation of Intel in over four decades”.
2024: the Year of Tech Layoffs
Intel is far from the first – and is unlikely to be the last – big tech company to shed large swathes of its workforce this year.
Not known for making redundancies, Apple finally succumbed to the layoff trend with hundreds of job losses. Cisco cut thousands of workers, Amazon announced hundreds of cuts, and Google has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs.
The list goes on: Microsoft, GoPro, Sonos, Bumble, EA, Sony and Mozilla are all among the docket of big tech companies that have made layoffs this year.
