Maxtor Cuts Jobs and Prepares for Seagate Takeover

Despite growth in the storage industry, jobs and locations will always be expendable -- this is just the nature of business. Maxtor announced that it will be cutting roughly 900 jobs in its Singapore location. The company blames the job cuts on net losses amounting up to $ 104 million over the last fiscal year.According to a Reuters report, Maxtor had been experiencing slower hard disk shipments and lower volume in general for its range of products. The company also told reporters that costs associated with mergers affected its bottom line. The report claims:

During the first quarter, Maxtor experienced lower than expected unit volume growth, largely attributable to the pending acquisition. This lower than expected unit growth, combined with marginal merger-related market share losses, placed increased pressure on the company's already burdened cost structure and constrained Maxtor's ability to compete, especially on the low-end of the desktop drive market.

Maxtor also mentions that the job cuts are also to prepare for the completion of Seagate's acquisition, which is already taking place. After the merger is complete, Seagate will become the world's largest manufacturer of computer hard disks. We previously reported that Seagate was opening a new facility in Singapore and was preparing to hire 2000 new R&D employees. Interestingly, other forms of storage are on the rise, including the growingly popular NAND flash memory technology. SanDisk and Toshiba recently announced a joint project to build a massive NAND flash manufacturing facility in Japan.