NEW YORK (CNN/Money) -
Wireless equipment manufacturer Motorola Inc. said Thursday it is cutting another 7,000 jobs as it takes $3.5 billion in charges to restructure its business and write down the value of some of its assets.
The company's CEO Christopher Galvin said in a statement that the company will aim to resize its operations to where it was in the mid-1990s in the belief that the rapid growth in the demand for its products seen in the late 1990s probably won't return.
"The investment environment of the late 1990s may never repeat itself, because many of the business models so highly touted then never succeeded in the first place," Galvin said in a statement.
The world's No. 2 maker of cellular phone handsets after Nokia also reaffirmed its previous earnings guidance for the second quarter and full-year. The company had previously said that it expects to lose 4 cents a share excluding special items in the current quarter, in line with current analysts' forecasts.
It said it should meet or slightly exceed the $6.4 million revenue target for the quarter, which is down from the $7.5 billion in revenue it posted a year earlier.
Motorola said it expects to see a return to profitability in the third and fourth quarter this year despite continued decline in revenue, and that it believes it should earn 4 cents a share excluding special items for the full year, slightly above the 3 cent a share consensus estimate of analysts surveyed by earnings tracker First Call.
The company also said it sees a sales decline of between 5 to 10 percent for the year from 2001 levels, which would bring revenue in the range of $26.5 billion to $28 billion. The First Call forecast is for revenue of $27.1 billion.
Motorola said the job cuts are expected to save $100 million in pretax costs for the remainder of this year and produce annual pretax savings of $700 million by 2003. Job cut costs are expected to account for a charge of $1.9 billion.
Another $1.1 billion in charges is related to the company lowering market valuations of its investments and other assets, and a final $530 million in charges comes from writing-off long-term financing receivables from its loans to Turkish cellular service operator Telsim that remain in default .
The company said it will take more than 90 percent of these charges in the second quarter.
Shares of Motorola (MOT: Research, Estimates) slipped 3 cents in pre-market trading on Instinet to $14.01 following the announcement after closing Wednesday trading down 24 cents.
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