

Seagate Technology PLC is set to become a much leaner company by the end of the year. The disk maker revealed in a regulatory filing this week that it’s planning to cut 1,600 positions over the next six months as part of an effort to trim operating expenses. Chief financial officer David Morton Jr. expects the move to save about $100 million annually.
The reduction should put Seagate in a much better position to deal with the two industry trends that are currently eating away at its bottom line. The first and perhaps most significant is the rise of flash storage, which is coming at the expense of the vendor’s high-end enterprise disk drives. Its impact is compounded by stagnating demand for traditional PCs that in turn squeezing Seagate’s consumer business.
The effect of these trends was all too apparent in the company’s recent third quarter earnings report, which showed revenue down 22 percent year-over-year at $2.6 billion. Seagate ended up taking a net loss of $21 million as a result that sent its share price plunging nearly 20 percent after the financial results were published. This week’s restructuring send a signal to investors that the company is actively trying to refocus on more profitable businesses like its budding flash unit.
Seagate recently unveiled a new solid-state memory drive that provides throughput of up to 10 gigabytes per second, which is nearly 40 percent more than the previous record holder. It’s based on technology that the company obtained through the acquisition of Avago Technologies Ltd’s flash business in 2014. A few months after the deal closed, the disk maker made another big purchase and bought a storage management vendor called Dot Hill Systems Corp., whose software now also plays a key role in its growth plans.
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