Marvell Technology To Open Redundancy Chute In Face Of Industry Slowdown

Marvell Technology is the latest chipmaker to open a redundancy process, blaming a slowdown across much of industry for the decision to erase some four percent of its workforce.

The action means about 320 people at the data processing, wireless and storage chip biz will be looking for a new employer, according to Bloomberg.

A spokesperson confirmed the development in a statement of classic corporate babble:

"We are streamlining our organization to ensure that our workforce is positioned got take advantage of our most promising opportunities, both now and when we emerge from the current industry down cycles.

"Specifically, we have been taking a close look at how our teams are distributed across multiple sites, and how they are being managed to ensure their optimal performance."

Unconfirmed reports from the China Semiconductor Forum indicate Marvell has decided to close its research and development center in the country, with additional layoffs expected.

Financially, Marvell closed off fiscal 2023 ended January 28 with a record turnover in sales to $5.919 billion, and operating profit of $238 million, compared to an operating loss of $347.7 million in the previous twelve month corporate calendar. Net loss was $164 million.

Marvell has big exposure to cloud customers, and there are some concerns that hyperscalers will continue to moderate orders. Guidance for the current quarter that ends late April is for revenue of $1.3 billion, which would be down on the $1.47 billion booked in Q1 of fiscal 2023.

On a conference call to discuss its financial results, president and CEO Matt Murphy said at the start of this month he expects "storage to decline further and inventory correction to spread to a number of additional areas."

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"We project datacenter storage to decline again sequentially in the first quarter across HDD, SSD and fiber channel and also expect to see inventory adjustments to a lesser degree, broadly impact the rest of our datacenter products.

"Slowdown in spending signaled this year by multiple large data center customers is also impacting the timing of the ramp of our cloud optimized design wins. Our key design win projects remain intact, but the start of production for some of these programs is being delayed."

Marvell is not alone: Intel, AMD, Micron and many other chipmakers have moved to reduce their expenses in the wake of declining financial fortunes, and though the long-term health of the chip industry is not disputed, incumbents are in for a bit of a bumpy ride in the short term. ®