Sun Microsystems's will lay off between 4,000 and 5,000 staff in the next six month under a board-approved plan to return
to profitability that, the company said Wednesday.
Sun, which has never fully recovered from the dot-com bust, has posted a string of losses or near break-even results over
the past five years. For its most recent quarter, the company reported a loss of $217 million.
Sun said it will cut about 11 percent to 13 percent of its workforce, or about 4,000 to 5,000 employees, over the next six
months. It will also sell off its campuses in Newark, New Jersey, and Sunnyvale, California, while retaining its operations
in Menlo Park, California, and Santa Clara, California.
From those actions, Sun expects annual savings of between $480 million and $590 million and to incur restructuring charges
between $340 million and $500 million. The charges will be spread out over the next several quarters, but the majority will
be incurred in the quarter that ends June 30, 2006, the company said.
Sun's board also approved the company's operational goals, which include fourth-quarter operating income of at least 4 percent
of revenue and longer-term operating income of at least 10 percent of revenue. The operating income and expense expectations
exclude restructuring charges, but include charges related to stock-based compensation and amortization of purchased intangibles.
Other goals for the company include revenue growth in the low-to-middle single digits, gross margin of about 43 percent and
operating expenses of about $5.6 billion to $6 billion for fiscal 2007. Sun's fiscal year begins July 1.
The move comes on the heels of one of the first major executive realignments at Sun since Jonathan Schwartz stepped in as
chief executive officer in April, replacing co-founder Scott McNealy, who is still chairman. Sun last month combined its Sparc and x64-based server groups under one umbrella group, now called the Systems Group, and tapped John Fowler as executive vice president of the new group. Fowler formerly headed
up the group responsible for Sun's x64-based servers that use Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron processors.
David Yen, formerly executive vice president of Sun's former Scalable Systems Group -- which managed the company's Sparc-based
servers -- will now serve as executive vice president of Sun's storage group. As part of the shake-up, Mark Canepa, who has
been with Sun for a decade and most recently headed up Sun's storage group, is leaving the company.
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