Cisco to Slash 6,500 Jobs; Sell Mexican Unit

Troubled networking giant Cisco Systems (Nasdaq: CSCO) said it will slash 6,500 jobs – representing about 9 percent of its workforce, in a bid to save about $1-billion in annual expenses.

The company will also dispose of its television set-top box manufacturing facility in Juarez, Mexico to Foxconn Technology Group.

The 5,000 employees at the Mexican unit will not lose their jobs immediately, however; they will be transferred to Foxconn in the first three months of fiscal 2012.

Moreover, 15 percent of workers at the vice-president level or above will be eliminated.

The company stated that 2,100 of the 6,500 people slated for layoffs have already elected to take a voluntary early-retirement program.

Cisco warned in May that these job cuts were looming, as it struggles to compete and restructures its operations in order to concentrate on core networking businesses.

In connection with the job cuts, the company will incur a massive pre-tax restructuring charge of up to $1.3-billion spread out over “several quarters,” Cisco said in a statement.

Analysts said the job cuts were necessary, but might not be enough to head off competition from such rivals as Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Juniper Systems.

Citigroup analyst John Slack wrote in a note to investors: “[The] greater challenges the company faces are slowing growth and defending of its core switching and routing market, which will likely be a multi-quarter or multi-year process to turn-around, in our view.”