Japan-based TDK Corp., the largest manufacturer of magnetic heads for disc drives, said it will cut about 12 percent of its global workforce – about 11,000 jobs – following a sharp drop in profit that was aggravated by the rising yen currency.

For the six-month period ended in September, the company said its net income plunged by 74 percent to 6.7 billion yen ($86 million) from 26.1 billion yen in the year-ago period ($334 million).

TDK also said it seeks to sell its organic light-emitting diode.

The yen just reached a post-war record against the U.S dollar – thereby placing great pressures on Japanese exports.

Slowing demand for electronic devices and the severe flooding in Thailand, where TDK operates a number of factories, also hurt the company’s production figures and bottom line.

For the full fiscal year (which will end in March), TDK drastically cut its profit forecast to 20 billion yen from 50 billion yen.

TDK follows closely on the heels of poor performance by another major Japanese corporation, Panasonic Corp., which announced that it plans to reduce its global workforce to below 350,000 by the end of March 12.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the company employed 367,000 at the end of March 2011.

The company expects to post a net loss of 420 billion yen ($5.54 billion) for the fiscal year ending March 2012 on revenues of 8.3 trillion.

That’s a wild swing from five months ago when Panasonic said it expected to record a net profit of 30 billion yen and revenue of 8.7 trillion yen for the full fiscal year.

Panasonic’s television and semiconductor businesses are especially weak – the company seeks to aggressively restructure these operations to cut costs. The company said on Monday that it will cease production at two of its Japanese television panel factories—one which makes plasma display panels and the other LCD panels.

Televisions have very quickly become commoditized, said Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo. We are making fundamental changes to the business structure

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