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IT Job Redundancies: The four biggest job cutters so far
By: Despite some sectors of the IT industry speculating that they may do well from the current economic situation as business moves to cheaper online advertising, some of the biggest computer, technology, and communications companies are having to cut their IT jobs amongst great swathes of redundancies. Let’s have a look at some of the companies who have made the four biggest cuts. First on the list is Sprint Nextel, the US telecommunications giant who have had to cut 14 percent of their workforce; that’s 8,000 employees with 850 individuals leaving voluntarily. The specific reasons for such drastic cuts include the severe decline in subscriptions in recent years, and is likely to have begun as far back as 2005 when Sprint acquired Nextel. Additionally, AT&T, who offer subscriptions to Apple’s iPhone, has been said to have had an effect on Sprint – but have recently had to make 12,000 job cuts of their own. Dell has also suffered significantly in recent months. In January, the computer giant announced that almost 2,000 jobs would be lost in Ireland adding to 8,900 in total worldwide. The company, which was founded in 1984, is planning to move its manufacturing and production jobs out to a third party company in Poland in order to cut costs in Limerick. The business has also announced a recruitment freeze. In 2008, BT announced 10,000 job cuts including 4,000 internal roles and 6,000 contractor roles. The company have cited the performance of their global services division as being the major contribution to an 11 percent fall in profit. 80 percent of the 4000 internal jobs lost will be based in the UK, whereas the contractor jobs will be international. Despite the good performance of the retail and wholesale sectors of the business, the global services performance was poor enough to drag the entire company down at such an unstable economic time. However, no doubt one of the biggest job cutters so far is the Japanese IT multinational: NEC. Earlier this month the company announced a massive 20,000 cuts, as the computer giant admitted huge losses of £1.03 billion last year. By March 2010, it is hoped that the business will have saved themselves about 80 billion Yen that would have been spent on overheads. Consumer confidence was a big part of the massive losses in Japan, with Hitachi also announcing cuts of up to 7,000. About The Author: Despite some sectors of the IT industry speculating that they may do well from the current economic situation as business moves to cheaper online advertising, some of the biggest computer, technology, and communications companies are having to cut their IT jobs. Sarah Maple writing about IT jobs and the Job Search market |