One week after completing its contentious takeover of PeopleSoft, Oracle on Friday began sending layoff notices to some of the 11,700 employees working at its former rival.
Oracle said in a five-paragraph statement, released after the market closed, that it was laying off 5,000 employees, or nearly 10 percent of the combined Oracle-PeopleSoft work force.
Several people close to Oracle said employees would learn if they are out of a job when overnight packages were to be delivered to their homes yesterday.
The company did not say which portion of the 5,000 employees to lose their jobs worked for the former PeopleSoft and which at Oracle. Nor did the company's statement mention anything about severance packages.
Oracle formally completed its US$10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft on Jan. 7. For years, Oracle, the undisputed leader in the corporate database market, has been struggling to gain a larger presence in the multibillion-dollar industry of back-office software that companies use to manage their finances, inventory and procurement needs. In that market, PeopleSoft was the uncontested No. 2, behind SAP of Germany.
Oracle said last summer that if it succeeded in a takeover of PeopleSoft, it would lay off as many as 6,000 PeopleSoft employees.
In an interview last month, Oracle's founder and chief executive, Lawrence Ellison, promised that his company would release at least one more major upgrade of PeopleSoft's flagship software product, and provide customers technical support for at least 10 more years.
"It's still not clear to me how, with so large a reduction in the work force, they're going to be able to continue to deliver the same level of service to PeopleSoft's customers," said Mark Smith, the chief executive of Ventana Research, a research firm in Silicon Valley.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last