Cisco to lay off another 1,300 employees

Networking-equipment maker's new job cuts come a year after the company announced plans to shed 14 percent of its global workforce.

Cisco Systems plans to reduce its global workforce by about 2 percent, or 1,300 positions, as part of the company's continuing restructuring to cut costs and increase profits.

The layoffs are "part of our plan to drive simplicity, speed of decisions and agility across Cisco," spokesperson Karen Tillman said in a statement today. "We routinely review our business to determine where we need to align investment based on growth opportunities."

Cisco had 65,223 employees at the end of its third quarter. The new round of layoffs comes a year after the networking-equipment maker giant announced plans to cut about 14 percent of its global workforce, or about 11,500 employees, including a 15 percent reduction in employees at the vice president level or higher.

The company has had poor luck trying to moving into the consumer space, and in a disappointing move for some, killed the Flip camcorder to focus its attention on its bread-and-butter networking business.

But as Cisco moved into new markets, sales in its core businesses slowed and Cisco lost market share. While Cisco still dominates in the IP routing market, it has been more challenged in its Ethernet switching business at the hands of rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei.

 But fortunes have been turning out for the San Jose, Calif.-based company. In May, Cisco reported third-quarter earnings of $2.2 billion, or 40 cents a share, on revenue of $11.6 billion, up 6.6 percent from a year ago. However, Wall Street had been expecting earnings of 47 cents a share on revenue of $11.59 billion.
However, CEO John Chambers sounded an optimistic note in May, saying that "In a cautious IT spending environment, we continue to outperform our competitors."

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