Cisco Systems said that it is laying off about 2% of its global workforce, which amounts to about 1,300 employees.
In an e-mailed statement on Monday, July 23, the company's vice president of corporate communications, Karen Tillman, commented, "We routinely review our business to determine where we need to align investment based on growth opportunities. Additionally, we continue to evaluate our organizational structure as part of our plan to drive simplicity, speed of decisions and agility across Cisco. As we focus on both of these efforts, we are performing a focused set of limited restructurings that will collectively impact approximately 2% of our global employee population."
The statement added that the reductions "are part of a continuous process of simplifying the company, as well as assessing the economic environment in certain parts of the world." According to MarketWatch, Cisco shares were down 1.4% in after-hours trades on Monday, after losing about 1.8% during the regular session.
As reported by Bloomberg, Cisco shares have tumbled 11 percent this year as CEO John Chambers has struggled to reverse slowing sales growth and increased market-share losses. The latest job cuts follow Chambers’s decision last year to eliminate about 6,500 jobs, or 9 percent of the full-time workforce, to help trim $1 billion in annual costs and boost profit growth.
In May, Chambers cited Europe’s debt crisis, weak government spending and a drop in orders from large corporate customers for a fourth-quarter profit forecast that was below analysts’ estimates, said the Bloomberg reporting.