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News > Technology
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Motorola to cut 7,000 jobs
Wireless equipment maker to take $3.5B in charges; reaffirms 2Q and '02 guidance.
June 27, 2002: 7:44 AM EDT

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.

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"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.  Top of page






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