Seagate to cut 1,600 jobs

Disk drive maker Seagate is spinning out 1,600 staff, three per cent of its head count, as it looks to save £100m a year.

The company had 46,673 employees at the end of May, down from 53,062 a year ago. The layoffs should be finished by the end of 2016. Seagate is lowering its disk drive manufacturing capacity in the face of falling PC sales and flash drives (SSDs) eating into performance disk drive sales, threatening to kill 15,000 and 10,000rpm drive shipments, leaving the core of the business focused on slower-spinning bulk capacity drives. This is a second bite of the staff-cuts cherry as Seagate strives to keep its cash generation machine working hard to satisfy investors and its own need for investments. ®