https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2019/03/13/western-digital-layoffs-wdc.html?ana=e_sjo_bn_newsalert&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWldFeE9UY3dZMkl4TXpneiIsInQiOiJvOXJzYjlZeFl5OUVnOFVRSDY5RWxLa2gwN3c3ZjZzclJXOXIzUUhuVTRRVnhlXC9cL0hrWkZONUpXSW9tc1hrNHlZMnVMWkpJUWlBdUM0RjVQczJldGw1ZFozeVdhZnNhVGlqK2xQMlE4UkpBYk00UnFqMStvaVZoKys5Y2NJYUhaIn0%3D
Western Digital Corp. is laying off more than 300 California employees, including 200 people based around its Silicon Valley headquarters.
The company is cutting 114 jobs from its San Jose headquarters plus 97 in Milpitas, where its SanDisk division is based, according to filings with the state's employment department on Tuesday night. Western Digital will also lay off 100 employees at its Irvine offices.
The layoffs will take place by May 7.
Western Digital is in the process of shifting its business model away from traditional storage hardware and into areas like chips for data centers, the cloud and artificial intelligence.
Its hard-disk-drive business business is in decline, with shipments for those products falling 19 percent in the second quarter, which ended Dec. 28. Its NAND memory chip business is also facing price cuts, which investors expect to contribute to a continued down-cycle.
Western Digital's second-quarter revenue was $4.2 billion, a 21 percent decline year-over-year, resulting in a loss of $487 million, compared to a loss of $823 million in the same quarter a year earlier.
The company's stock price has fallen 53.5 percent in the last 12 months.
The latest layoffs include vice presidents across Western Digital's engineering, organizational development and training, business development and talent acquisition units, according to the filings. Most of the roles affected by the layoffs are in engineering and more than 50 of the total roles affected are in R&D, which is an area executives have touted as an important investment area for the company.
“There will not be any bumping rights for the affected employees, that is, employees will not be able to displace more junior employees out of their job positions as a result of this closure,” the documents state.
The company didn’t immediately respond to questions asking it to clarify what is meant by a "closure" and "displacing" young employees.
Western Digital President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Cordano told the Business Journal last summer that he had hoped to consolidate the workforce over multiple years in what he called "modular chunks." In the interview, Cordano described plans for a company reorganization that included changes to its hierarchical structure and culture.
The changes are aimed at attracting new talent, he said: “It's a competency we think we need to be competitive over time.”
In 2017, Western Digital began the process of moving its headquarters to San Jose from Irvine as a part of a company-wide consolidation. As of 2018, the company had 5,800 Bay Area employees, including 2,800 in San Jose, according to the latest Business Journal research.
It also has employees in Milpitas, Fremont, Newark and Redwood City. The company didn’t immediately respond to whether that exact headcount or office locations has changed recently.
The company also conducted layoffs last year, but they were substantially smaller, cutting no more than 28 people from each Silicon Valley facility. At the time, CEO Steve Milligan said in a statement that “we are taking actions to better align our cost and expense structure to near-term business conditions while continuing to deliver innovative solutions to drive our future success.”