Cisco to lay off 5,500 employees

UPDATED: Cisco has announced that it is letting go of 5,500 (seven per cent) of its staff.

This is significantly less than the figure of 14,000 cuts that was reported by CRN yesterday. 

The company announced in its quarterly earnings call that it is to cut these jobs in the first quarter of 2017 in an effort to prioritise its efforts in domains like security, IoT, collaboration, data centers and cloud services.

It is still unknown as to how much employees in the UK will be affected.

ORIGINAL STORY

Cisco will fire 14,000 of its 73,000 staff. It will be the largest loss of jobs in the company’s 32-year history.

In a report from CRN, it is claimed that Cisco, the world’s largest networking equipment company, will lay off a massive 19 per cent of its global staff in its efforts to transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization.

The news comes as a bit of a shock considering that Cisco’s stock has increased more than 15 per cent over the past three months and hit a nine-year high on this week at $31.23 per share.

In the report, it is claimed that thecompany is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, as many early retirement package plans have already been offered to employees.

Cisco is set to announce its fourth fiscal quarter results after the market closes tomorrow.

Last November, the company opened its new UK office, based near London’s Silicon Roundabout, after promising to invest more than $1 billion (£770 million) in the UK over the next three to five years.

The London office houses more than 200 employees, and is one of 14 offices that Cisco has in the UK.

It is unknown right now how many of the estimated 7,000 UK employees will be affected by this news.

This report is currently unconfirmed after Cisco declined to comment, but it is worth noting that Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research predicted in a January report that Cisco would cut 14,000 employees in 2016.

He cited the decreased need for as many employees in the back-end process and the company’s transition to the cloud.