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.
The Taiwan Automation Intelligence and Robot Show, which is to be held from Wednesday to Saturday at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, would showcase the latest in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven robotics and automation technologies, the organizer said yesterday. The event would highlight applications in smart manufacturing, as well as information and communications technology, the Taiwan Automation Intelligence and Robotics Association said. More than 1,000 companies are to display innovations in semiconductors, electromechanics, industrial automation and intelligent manufacturing, it said in a news release. Visitors can explore automated guided vehicles, 3D machine vision systems and AI-powered applications at the show, along
AI SERVER DEMAND: ‘Overall industry demand continues to outpace supply and we are expanding capacity to meet it,’ the company’s chief executive officer said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported that net profit last quarter rose 27 percent from the same quarter last year on the back of demand for cloud services and high-performance computing products. Net profit surged to NT$44.36 billion (US$1.48 billion) from NT$35.04 billion a year earlier. On a quarterly basis, net profit grew 5 percent from NT$42.1 billion. Earnings per share expanded to NT$3.19 from NT$2.53 a year earlier and NT$3.03 in the first quarter. However, a sharp appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar since early May has weighed on the company’s performance, Hon Hai chief financial officer David Huang (黃德才)
FORECAST: The greater computing power needed for emerging AI applications has driven higher demand for advanced semiconductors worldwide, TSMC said The government-supported Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) has raised its forecast for this year’s growth in the output value of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry to above 22 percent on strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. In its latest IEK Current Quarterly Model report, the institute said the local semiconductor industry would have output of NT$6.5 trillion (US$216.6 billion) this year, up 22.2 percent from a year earlier, an upward revision from a 19.1 percent increase estimate made in May. The strong showing of the local semiconductor industry largely reflected the stronger-than-expected performance of the integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing segment,
COLLABORATION: Softbank would supply manufacturing gear to the factory, and a joint venture would make AI data center equipment, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) would operate a US factory owned by Softbank Group Corp, setting up what is in the running to be the first manufacturing site in the Japanese company’s US$500 billion Stargate venture with OpenAI and Oracle Corp. Softbank is acquiring Hon Hai’s electric-vehicle plant in Ohio, but the Taiwanese company would continue to run the complex after turning it into an artificial intelligence (AI) server production plant, Hon Hai chairman Young Liu (劉揚偉) said yesterday. Softbank would supply manufacturing gear to the factory, and a joint venture between the two companies would make AI data
RSS