Cisco laying off 5,500 employees amid tech upheaval

SAN JOSE, Calif. » Cisco Systems today said it will cut approximately 5,500 jobs as part of a restructuring plan that the networking company said was necessary to help it focus more on high-growth areas such at security and cloud technologies.

Cisco said the cuts, which will begin in the company’s current, fiscal first quarter, would amount to about 7 percent of its total workforce. Reports earlier in the day said Cisco was likely to cut as many as 14,000 jobs. No details were immediately given as to how many jobs Cisco plans on shedding in the Bay Area.

The shake-up means about 7 percent of Cisco’s roughly 74,000 workers will lose their jobs beginning this summer.

The purge is the latest fallout by a relentless march of innovation that has forced some of the world’s biggest and oldest technology companies to head in new directions in search of revenue growth.

In Cisco’s case, its business has been hurt as more of its corporate customers rely on remote data centers for their computing needs instead of online networks maintained on their own premises.

Cisco made the job-cut announcement as part of its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings report. The company said that for the quarter ended July 30, it earned $2.8 billion, or 56 cents a share, on $12.6 billion, compared with a profit of $2.3 billion, or 45 cents a share, on $12.8 billion in sales in the same period a year ago.

Excluding one-time items, Cisco earned 63 cents a share, which topped the 60-cents-a-share estimate forecast by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Cisco’s sales were in line with analysts’ consensus $12.6 billion outlook.

For its fiscal first quarter, Cisco estimates its earnings, excluding one-time items, to be in a range of 58 cents and 60 cents a share, and for sales to be between 1 percent lower and 1 percent higher than the $12.7 billion it reported a year ago.

In after-hours trading, Cisco shares were off by almost 1 percent at $30.47.