Hitachi cuts more jobs

Hitachi is Japan's biggest electronics manufacturer

Japan's biggest electronics maker, Hitachi, has said it will axe a further 1,100 posts from its semiconductor business, on top of 14,700 job cuts announced in August.

The new job cuts represent less than 1% of Hitachi's 340,000-strong global workforce, but highlights the firm's continuing struggle to turn around the money-losing chip division.

There may yet be further job cuts in other units, a Hitachi spokeswoman said.

The global economic slowdown and the drop in semiconductor prices have eaten into company profits, analysts said.

Sector woes

On Friday, South Korea's Hynix, the world's third largest computer chip maker, reported losses much worse than analysts' expectations.

And NEC, the world's second ranking semiconductor maker, on Friday said its plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange by March could be postponed because of the deteriorating market conditions in the US.

"There is a possibility," an NEC spokesman said.

"NEC is evaluating the market conditions... and they aren't great. But we planned to list this fiscal year and there is still time."

Hitachi's profitability

In August, Hitachi said it was cutting 14,700 jobs, or 4.3% of its global work force, 2,000 of them in the semiconductor business.

The latest shake-up will see 200 staff transferred to other sections in Hitachi, and others lost through early retirement, the company said.

The cuts will be made at Japan-based operations, which employ 19,000 of the 25,000 people who work in Hitachi's semiconductor unit.

The company said it hopes to return its semiconductor business to profitability by next year, having forecast at loss of 95bn yen (£545m; $783m) for the fiscal year ending in March.

Overall, Hitachi forecast a loss of 140bn yen (£802m; $1.2bn) for the fiscal year, instead of the profit of 90bn yen (£516m; $742m) it had expected.

Other Japanese electronics companies, such as Toshiba, Fujitsu and NEC, have cut jobs in numbers unprecedented in Japanese corporate history.