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Fujitsu Announces Job Reductions and Restructuring Charges

August 22, 2001 by Jeff Shepard

Fujitsu Ltd. (Japan) announced that it will cut 16,400 jobs and take a $2.5 billion restructuring charge, and company executives said the steps will position Fujitsu to make an operating profit of $3.33 billion in fiscal 2003.

According to Naoyuki Akihisa, president and CEO of Fujitsu, the company will exit the market for hard-disk drives and desktop PCs, reduce printer production and lay off 4,200 employees in the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The company will continue to produce hard drives for servers and notebook computers.

Akihisa also stated that Fujitsu will not sell its Flash fabrication facility in Gresham, OR. Instead, it will form a joint venture with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA), its Flash memory partner, to govern the fabrication facility. Fujitsu will also reduce its front-end semiconductor manufacturing lines in Japan, closing a logic line in Mie, a FRAM line in Iwate and a Flash line in Aizu-Wakamatsu. Two thousand workers will lose jobs at the Iwate fabrication facility, and 1,600 will lose positions with the Aizu-Wakamatsu line closure.

Fujitsu will also cut two back-end and test lines in Japan, leaving five operational. The line closures will cost about $1.04 billion. Fujitsu will also spend about $166.0 million to streamline production of other electronic components.