Creative has announced on Friday night that it will be laying off 300 more workers mostly from its US and Europe subsidiaries. In the course, the company will incur restructuring charges of about US$10million for its fiscal 3rd quarter, the three months ending 31 March 2009. The $10million will include severance payments to the workers and facilities costs from consolidation of certain international offices. This would most likely means that jobs or services which have been used to be provided by the US and Europe arm will now be transferred to Singapore. Despite this new round of job cuts, Creative says that its Singapore workforce will not see a significant change and that the company is still hiring R&D engineers.
It seems that Creative is drastically cutting its head count and that can be seen as a good thing as it gives the company more freedom financially for this difficult period of time. This is not to say that the Creative Labs in the US and UK has been doing a bad job. Instead I feel that in terms of embracing the social media and reaching out to the customers, they are way better than their Singapore counterparts. However, the fact remains that they are more expensive to employ and being far away from the HQ doesn't help. So regretfully, its yet another tough business decision to make. I do feel that 2009 would be a good year for Creative to turn around as all the cost cutting measures that it have implemented should show significant results. What it needs now is to lower the price of its older products and release its new range of products soon. Honestly, it has been a long time since the ZEN X-Fi and I can really do with some new product excitement. But no, I do not want a VoiceOver ZEN Stone thank you very much.
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