
Only 40% - pah!
In UK, it will be worse. Of the 373 current employees, only 131 have a long-term future at Broadcom. People will know their fate on Tuesday 13th
Broadcom has confirmed to The Register that staff have been axed in its just-acquired CA Technologies business, though declined to reveal numbers. Rumors of mass layoffs emerged this week: first it was feared roughly 300 employees were being let go, and now it may be as many as 2,000 in the US. CA Technologies employed about …
This post has been deleted by its author
Broadcom is really Avago which is really Silver Lake, the VC guys.
I suggest you read a few of Hock Tan's investors' meetings. His goal is to buy a company, sell off all the parts that don't meet his profit targets and which do not dominate their market segment if he can. He takes the remnants and cuts them to the level where they can support what remains and the (bare) necessary to keep that business going. He's not one on research and new business lines, just on continued development of what profitable business lines he has. In that sense he's much like Cisco in the 90s when their approach to research was to buy smaller rivals who looked like they might have a good idea.
It's an extremely efficient business machine. Many might say it's not very humane, and you won't see anything particularly new and innovative come out of a machine like that. But looking at the profit margins it achieves, it's what investors want these days.
This works in an environment of low inflation and cheap credit like we have today. We've seen a similar period in the 60s that led to many conglomerates of less related companies. Periods of higher interest rates tended to leave those conglomerate models struggling, though, so investors might well sour on Broadcom if rates rise and Broadcom is forced to depend more on internal innovation rather than acquisitions to grow.
Those of us that have invested in mutual funds and have retirement plans being funded through stocks make our choices on ROI in the near term. The wonderful government which by its nature must think conservatively due its fiduciary duty demands that R&D especially blue sky research be discounted furthering this mindset that encourages this behavior and we the investors march right along in screwing the future! If there was an honest, viable way to treat pure research on a balance sheet and if applied research was treated as overhead rather then a cost center these types of corporate rape would no longer be as viable. Thank you T. Boone Pickens
When your company has been bought, get your CV out immediately. After the blood bath, the prospective new employers will be buried in applications and by that time it is too late. Employers rarely have any loyalty to the employees and it is only reasonable to reciprocate. I got out immediately last time the whiff of mega death could be felt. and I am glad I did.
1. Buy up-and-coming software company, giving founders the pay day they are probably desperate for.
2. As soon as purchase is finalised, make half the staff redundant.
3. Jack up licence fees, hoping that most customers are too dependant on the software to switch.
4. Software development slows down, gets integrated into anonymously-named buzzword of the week enterprise suite thing.
5. More redundancies? Why not.
6. Goto 1.
Jack up licence fees, hoping that most customers are too dependant on the software to switch.
Software development slows down, gets integrated into anonymously-named buzzword of the week enterprise suite thing.
This is what Atlassian does and they haven't even been bought.
What they don’t want you to know is that CA Technologies had to lay off a large portion of the US workforce just to make the Broadcom deal viable. So although 2000 is a very large number, the actual number impacted by this horrendous Broadcom deal that benefited no one except Broadcom and Mike Gregoire is much, much larger.
Yes, I am one of those let go pre-merger. Makes me angry, yes, but doesn’t make my statement any less true.
It's incomprehensible that a company can be worth paying $19B, and then you immediately discard 40%.
Cutting 10% risks leaving a company in crisis. Unless you are closing an isolated factory, cutting 40% leaves a company non-functional.
Companies are notoriously bad at figuring out what is 'fat' when cutting 5%. They'll cut a guy putting in 6 hour days on the off-season, then be short of people at the end of the quarter. There isn't any way that a 40% cut can be done wisely.
Broadcom bought CA for one thing only, the mainframe software division. This generates 55% of the revenue from 35% of the staff, but more importantly 90% of the profit. Follow the money people. If you work in other than the mainframe or automation BUs, then you are living on borrowed time.
"Some hard numbers will go public soon, since US states like California and New York have public Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) registers, meaning large companies have to publicly declare their layoffs."
Except that companies are masters of blowing holes in this. They use tricks like trickling out the layoffs over a period of time to avoid crossing the reporting threshold. IBM are the total masters of this, I would imagine that Broadcom and CA's HR departments are well capable of this too.