NetApp Ditches 8% Of Staff As Customers Put Away Wallets

NetApp is laying off roughly eight percent of its workforce following the downturn in customer spending, adding to the employment bonfire raging across the tech industry.

According to NetApp's 2022 annual report, filed in April last year, it employed around 12,000 people globally so the workforce redundancies could equate to about 960 heads.

In a letter to staff, CEO George Kurian said businesses are "facing an increasingly challenging macroeconomic environment, which is driving more conservatism in IT spending. We are not immune to these challenges."

The means NetApp needs to concentrate on areas that yield the best commercial returns, as well as "adapting our cost structure to reflect focus and market conditions and raising the bar on our performance."

Quite how removing a chunk of the workforce helps with the last ambition in unclear.

"Starting today, we will be making changes that will reduce the size of our team by around eight percent," said the CEO. "In parts of EMEA and APAC, the realignment and potential employee impact are subject to local consultation processes, which are ongoing."

Like Zuckerberg, Benioff, Pichai and Nadella, NetApp's boss also said he was sorry for making job cuts, but unlike the others, his recruitment policies weren't to blame for the current predicament.

"While very thoughtful in planning, this is one of the hardest tasks to take, and we fully appreciate the impact that may have on the talented team members who has made countless contributions to our business."

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"Today is undoubtedly a difficult day. The necessary steps we are taking to strengthen our competitive posture and enable us to emerge from this season better than we were before do not overshadow the impact that an action such as this has on our team," Kurian added.

The layoffs are expected to be complete by the close of NetApp's fiscal 2023.

NetApp's last full year results showed some decent gains with revenue up to $6.32 billion versus $5.74 billion the year before and net profit of $937 million compared to $730 million.

The storage industry struggled with supply chain issues during the early stages of the pandemic, and didn't record the same double digit rises seen in the PC, cloud and enterprise software sectors.

Something of a pandemic reckoning is happening across some of those previously rapidly growing areas. Industry tracker Layoff.fyi reckons some 210,000 IT industry people have lost their jobs since the start of 2022, including 55,000 this month alone. ®