Fidelity Investments will eliminate 1,700 jobs early next year in a second round of cuts at the largest US mutual fund company, which has seen its money management fees decline along with the markets.
Combined with 1,300 cuts that Fidelity announced last week, the second round disclosed on Friday would eliminate about 7 percent of the company’s work force of about 44,400, said Anne Crowley, a spokeswoman for Boston-based Fidelity.
Details on which jobs are to be cut in the second round haven’t been worked out. But the cuts would be spread roughly proportionally across Fidelity’s operations, with the reductions occurring sometime in the first three months of next year, Crowley said.
FIRST ROUND
In the first round, which is taking place this month, layoff notices began going out earlier this week, affecting management positions as well as lower-level jobs at privately held Fidelity. No fund managers or investment analysts are being laid off in the first round.
Crowley said on Friday it was too early to say whether that would be the case in the second round.
In a letter distributed to employees describing the initial cuts, Fidelity president Rodger Lawson said recent market volatility had hurt company revenue, leading him to conclude that “many of the cost improvement plans which would have been phased in by our business units over the next three years need to be accelerated.”
The latest cuts are in addition to reductions totaling about 800 jobs in two rounds earlier this year after Fidelity reorganized some business units.
Cuts also have been announced in recent weeks at smaller mutual fund firms including Janus Capital Group Inc, which is eliminating about 115 jobs, or about 9 percent of its work force.
CITIGROUP
Separately, Citigroup spokeswoman Shannon Bell said on Friday the company would make further job cuts to cope with the financial crisis.
She declined to confirm a Wall Street Journal report of 10,000 job cuts.
“We have said consistently that we will reduce expenses, including through staff reductions,” she said.
“We are showing good traction on cutting our expenses; and we are selling businesses and shedding assets that don’t fit our strategic profile,” Bell said.
“We will continue to carefully manage our head count levels as we re-engineer the company in line with our stated goal and market realities,” she said.
Citigroup has already announced plans for 22,000 staff reductions and has eliminated at least 13,000 so far this year, company figures show.
Last month, Citi reported a third-quarter loss of US$2.8 billion, its fourth straight quarter in the red.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts