Citigroup Inc revealed plans to cut 52,000 jobs by early next year in a dramatic move to restore the No. 2 U.S. bank to health as it combats mounting debt losses and sagging economies worldwide.
The cuts announced by Chief Executive Vikram Pandit on Monday affect 15 percent of Citigroup's workforce, and are in addition to 23,000 jobs eliminated between January and September.
Citigroup plans to slash expenses by as much as 20 percent, and spend a total of $50 billion to $52 billion in 2009. That compares with $61.9 billion over the last four quarters.
The cuts will be global, affecting many regions and business lines, including the retail and investment banks, a person close to the matter said. About one-half will come from layoffs and attrition, and the rest from the sale of units, such as the German retail banking business.
Pandit became Citigroup's chief executive last December, and has faced much criticism from investors and others for failing to implement a workable turnaround plan. The New York-based bank has lost $20.3 billion in the last year, and some analysts do not expect it to make money before 2010.
"As the economy continues to weaken they will have greater credit losses," said Michael Holland, founder of money manager Holland & Co in New York. "Cuts will lessen the losses, but they in no way guarantee profitability."
Pandit told employees in a memo that Citigroup has spent the last year "getting fit," and projects a "difficult" 2009 for clients and customers.
Citigroup's latest cuts are the most by any U.S. company since the global credit crisis began last year. They are also the second most ever, trailing the 60,000 that International Business Machines Corp IBM announced in 1993, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.
The latest cuts would leave Citigroup with about 300,000 employees, down 20 percent from the end of 2007 and about the same number it had at the end of 2005. People at the bank said the cuts should be made by the first couple of months of 2009.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
No more firing, or hiring, at Kingfisher Airlines
Kingfisher Airlines said while it would not lay off employees, it would also not hire new people as long as the current downturn continued.
'There is no question of layoffs. The prime minister has given us the assurance that the government would do whatever it takes to address the problems of the aviation sector,' Kingfisher chairman Vijay Mallya said in an address at the World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his interaction with industry leaders Nov 3 asked them to refrain from large-scale layoffs, and advised them to bear in mind their social obligations.
Soon after, he also intervened to ensure state-run oil firms gave more time to domestic carriers to settle their fuel dues.
But Mallya said the aviation industry was being 'overtaxed'.
'The basic airfares are lower than fuel surcharge for many Indian destinations. Taxes should immediately be rationalised to make flying affordable,' he said.
Mallya, who is also member of parliament, earlier indicated that if the slump in the market continues, the industry would witness more layoffs.
Jet Airways last month sacked 1,900 employees only to reinstate them a day later, reportedly on government pressure. Carriers including Kingfisher Airlines have over the past month retrenched some staff.
Kingfisher has now sought permission from the government to sell a part of its equity to international carriers, saying a change of policy on foreign investment would help the industry that was facing turbulent weather.
'There is no question of layoffs. The prime minister has given us the assurance that the government would do whatever it takes to address the problems of the aviation sector,' Kingfisher chairman Vijay Mallya said in an address at the World Economic Forum's India Economic Summit.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his interaction with industry leaders Nov 3 asked them to refrain from large-scale layoffs, and advised them to bear in mind their social obligations.
Soon after, he also intervened to ensure state-run oil firms gave more time to domestic carriers to settle their fuel dues.
But Mallya said the aviation industry was being 'overtaxed'.
'The basic airfares are lower than fuel surcharge for many Indian destinations. Taxes should immediately be rationalised to make flying affordable,' he said.
Mallya, who is also member of parliament, earlier indicated that if the slump in the market continues, the industry would witness more layoffs.
Jet Airways last month sacked 1,900 employees only to reinstate them a day later, reportedly on government pressure. Carriers including Kingfisher Airlines have over the past month retrenched some staff.
Kingfisher has now sought permission from the government to sell a part of its equity to international carriers, saying a change of policy on foreign investment would help the industry that was facing turbulent weather.
Monday, November 17, 2008
China to land moon-buggy by 2012
China aims to put an unmanned buggy on the moon by 2012, local media reported, laying the ground for its greater ambitions of putting a man on the moon.
China became the third country to put a man in space with its own rocket, after the former Soviet Union and the United States. It sent two more astronauts on a five-day flight on its Shenzhou VI craft in October 2005.
China launched its third manned space mission in September, with live-to-air footage of its first space-walk captivating the nation.
Its first lunar probe, the Chang'e-1 satellite, named after a lonely goddess who lives with a rabbit on the moon and pines for her husband, finished its mission last month after orbiting the moon thousands of times.
"China will send a moon-lander and moon-buggy around 2012," the Beijing News said, citing state television.
Before the moon-lander, China will send Chang'e-2 satellite to fulfil another circumlunar mission, CCTV added.
China said its lunar mission would include three steps of "orbiting, landing and returning", but has not disclosed schedule of any manned moon mission so far.
China became the third country to put a man in space with its own rocket, after the former Soviet Union and the United States. It sent two more astronauts on a five-day flight on its Shenzhou VI craft in October 2005.
China launched its third manned space mission in September, with live-to-air footage of its first space-walk captivating the nation.
Its first lunar probe, the Chang'e-1 satellite, named after a lonely goddess who lives with a rabbit on the moon and pines for her husband, finished its mission last month after orbiting the moon thousands of times.
"China will send a moon-lander and moon-buggy around 2012," the Beijing News said, citing state television.
Before the moon-lander, China will send Chang'e-2 satellite to fulfil another circumlunar mission, CCTV added.
China said its lunar mission would include three steps of "orbiting, landing and returning", but has not disclosed schedule of any manned moon mission so far.
Laurels for India on successful moon landing
France, chair of the 27-nation European Union has lauded India on the successful lunar exploration mission, which, it stressed, confirmed "India's eminent position among the world-class scientific and technological powers".
"France, on behalf of the European Union, warmly congratulates India for the successful landing of the Moon Impact Probe and the launch of the lunar exploration programme," the French embassy said in a statement here.
"This remarkable success of the Indian space vehicle confirms anew India's eminent position among the world-class scientific and technological powers," it said.
"France and the European Union look forward to the strengthening of the existing scientific cooperations with India in the field of space, which are particularly promiseful for the development of science and knowledge worldwide," the statement underlined.
In a milestone for the country's space programme, India planted its national colours on the moon Thursday as the foil-wrapped Moon Impact Probe landed in the Shakelton crater near the lunar South Pole.
The Moon Impact Probe, dropped from the larger, unmanned Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, sampled the thin lunar atmosphere during a half-hour free fall.
Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned lunar probe, was launched Oct 22. After the US, then USSR, and Japan, India is the fourth country to land a probe on moon.
"France, on behalf of the European Union, warmly congratulates India for the successful landing of the Moon Impact Probe and the launch of the lunar exploration programme," the French embassy said in a statement here.
"This remarkable success of the Indian space vehicle confirms anew India's eminent position among the world-class scientific and technological powers," it said.
"France and the European Union look forward to the strengthening of the existing scientific cooperations with India in the field of space, which are particularly promiseful for the development of science and knowledge worldwide," the statement underlined.
In a milestone for the country's space programme, India planted its national colours on the moon Thursday as the foil-wrapped Moon Impact Probe landed in the Shakelton crater near the lunar South Pole.
The Moon Impact Probe, dropped from the larger, unmanned Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, sampled the thin lunar atmosphere during a half-hour free fall.
Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned lunar probe, was launched Oct 22. After the US, then USSR, and Japan, India is the fourth country to land a probe on moon.
GlobalLogic records impressive growth in 2008
GlobalLogic, the global leader in product development has announced that it continued to experience solid momentum and growth during the third quarter (the company’s fiscal second quarter) ending September adding 25 new technology clients representing the mobile, healthcare, consumer and enterprise software product verticals.
The company’s revenue increased 40% through the first six months of its fiscal year, with GlobalLogic exceeding $100M in revenue for the first time. In addition, GlobalLogic grew its employee base nearly 20% during the quarter, reaching 3,000 employees worldwide. Despite the global economic slowdown, its business outlook remains promising and robust. GlobalLogic expects to continue its quarter over quarter growth.
“Considering the current downturn in the economy and its potential effects on global markets, GlobalLogic’s specialization in full software product development lifecycle services is a relatively strong sector to be in,” explained GlobalLogic CEO Peter Harrison. “Our technology clients, both early stage and established, are able to utilize their GlobalLogic partnership to attain product quality, economy and time-to-market benefits through access to our product engineering centers in the US, India, Ukraine and China.”
Other key milestones for GlobalLogic in the first half of its fiscal year, April-September, 2008 included:
* Expansion including Ukraine, where GlobalLogic is the largest technology employer, China and Israel
* Significant new client wins with Microsoft, Yahoo, Qualcomm, JDSU, Genband and Avid
* Industry recognition for GlobalLogic’s Agile-based Version 1.0 service at innovation conferences such as Demofall2008; Dataquest and Hewitt Associates for Top Employer in India and Ukraine; and Microsoft partner of the year in Central and Eastern Europe
* World-class, public markets experienced executive team additions including CFO Wayne Grubbs, and President Shashank Samant
The company’s revenue increased 40% through the first six months of its fiscal year, with GlobalLogic exceeding $100M in revenue for the first time. In addition, GlobalLogic grew its employee base nearly 20% during the quarter, reaching 3,000 employees worldwide. Despite the global economic slowdown, its business outlook remains promising and robust. GlobalLogic expects to continue its quarter over quarter growth.
“Considering the current downturn in the economy and its potential effects on global markets, GlobalLogic’s specialization in full software product development lifecycle services is a relatively strong sector to be in,” explained GlobalLogic CEO Peter Harrison. “Our technology clients, both early stage and established, are able to utilize their GlobalLogic partnership to attain product quality, economy and time-to-market benefits through access to our product engineering centers in the US, India, Ukraine and China.”
Other key milestones for GlobalLogic in the first half of its fiscal year, April-September, 2008 included:
* Expansion including Ukraine, where GlobalLogic is the largest technology employer, China and Israel
* Significant new client wins with Microsoft, Yahoo, Qualcomm, JDSU, Genband and Avid
* Industry recognition for GlobalLogic’s Agile-based Version 1.0 service at innovation conferences such as Demofall2008; Dataquest and Hewitt Associates for Top Employer in India and Ukraine; and Microsoft partner of the year in Central and Eastern Europe
* World-class, public markets experienced executive team additions including CFO Wayne Grubbs, and President Shashank Samant
Tech sector may lose 180,000 jobs
The technology sector is on pace to lose 180,000 jobs this year, the most since 2003, amid a global economic downturn, according to a report.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, a Chicago-based global consulting firm which tracks job-cut announcements, said telecommunications, electronics and computer industry companies had cut 140,422 jobs through October 31.
It said 69,654 tech-sector jobs had been cut in the third quarter of the year alone. That did not include major layoffs announced since October 31 such as the 5,000 to 6,000 job cuts at Sun Microsystems.
"At the current pace, the year-end total could reach 180,000, which would be the largest annual total since 2003, when technology firms announced 228,325 job cuts," it said.
A total of 107,295 tech-sector jobs were cut in 2007.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, a Chicago-based global consulting firm which tracks job-cut announcements, said telecommunications, electronics and computer industry companies had cut 140,422 jobs through October 31.
It said 69,654 tech-sector jobs had been cut in the third quarter of the year alone. That did not include major layoffs announced since October 31 such as the 5,000 to 6,000 job cuts at Sun Microsystems.
"At the current pace, the year-end total could reach 180,000, which would be the largest annual total since 2003, when technology firms announced 228,325 job cuts," it said.
A total of 107,295 tech-sector jobs were cut in 2007.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Why must enterprises move to Green technologies?
Going green is the mantra often heard among Indian IT enterprises. It is an important business initiative that is driving good corporates towards greener technologies.
Going green is not just about being environment-friendly but also translates into one of the best ways to save money. A recent IDC report indicates that energy and cooling expenses will grow eight times faster than purchasing costs of new servers through 2010. In IDC’s latest Green Poll in the APAC region, almost 81 percent of the participating organizations said that the Green-ness of an IT technology would become increasingly important when it comes to selecting suppliers. About 18 percent of the organizations said that they were already considering this factor while selecting suppliers, while 30 percent said they were putting systems into place to start doing so in the near future. So Green IT opens up an abundance of opportunities for enterprises in any country.
Why should your IT go Green?
Rising global warming, increased energy costs and greater awareness about its socio-economic implications has forced organizations to look for ways to reduce their carbon-emission footprint. However, what has escaped attention is the massive amount of energy your IT consumes. Enterprise IT, which accounts for up to 40 percent of an organization’s energy requirement, has a big role to play to reduce greenhouse gases. According to a Forrester survey, over 41 percent of people in the IT departments believe energy efficiency and equipment recycling are important factors that need to be considered. In the same survey, 65 percent believed reduction of energy related operating costs as the driving factor for implementing Green IT.
What drives Green in India?
Adoption of Green IT is not just about buying green data centers and setting up Green IT infrastructure. It needs a complete 360-degree approach - starting from the vision of the top management to the awareness among employees. “An environment-conscious organization should define what ‘green’ means to it as there is no global, industry-wide recognized standard today that defines a green data center or organization, and take steps to follow the corporate green guidelines. The long-term goal of the green data center operation is to achieve carbon neutrality.
Data centers – The Energy Guzzlers
Undoubtedly, data centers have the maximum energy requirements, given the massive number of powerful servers that are housed in today’s data centers, which are sometimes as big as the size of a football field. And these data centers may require as much cooling power as the electricity to run them. Some studies say that these data centers account for between 1.2 and 2.0 percent of electricity consumed in the United States. It is also a known fact that many of the servers in the data centers run at a low utilization level of 10% to 15%. This causes significant wastage through redundant hardware, memory, network devices and power supplies. In earlier times, enterprises would have put up with this excess capacity, given the IT department’s risk-aversion. However, with maturing IT coupled with need to rein-in energy use, organizations are now forced to adopt strategies to reduce their data center operational costs.
Strategies to implement Green technologies
What are the steps you should take to optimize the consumption of electricity as well as reduce the number of servers in your data center? Enterprise IT groups are looking at various options – such as PC Power management software and deployment of energy efficient servers and network devices. However, these piecemeal steps will not yield the desired results; you need a more holistic approach to solve this problem. The answer lies in the adoption of Cloud computing and Virtualization within your enterprise IT – two strategies that can a go a long way in reducing your energy-dependency and thus make your organization truly green.
Embrace Cloud Computing
Cloud computing lets you use computational power and storage space from a third-party service provider, thus lowering demand for addition of more servers in your data center. You can also reduce the number of applications deployed on your data centers by using similar applications hosted by SaaS providers. Now, cloud computing means different things to different people – depending upon which vendor you talk to. Therefore, it could be utility computing or grid or Software-as-a-Service or even Platform-as-a-Service. However, one thing is clear – all of them refer to some service provided by a third-party provider outside the corporate firewall. It is true there are concerns with respect to security, availability and customer’s data privacy in these services – as shown recently by the outage at Amazon’s S3 storage service. However, these issues will get addressed as the technology and industry matures.
There are primarily two types of cloud services, namely Infrastructure in the cloud and Applications in the cloud. Infrastructure in the cloud refers to raw CPU power and data storage space you can use on-demand over Internet.
You should also explore applications in the cloud type of services as a tool to minimize data center load. Look at business applications that are not critical to your business or those you can’t afford to maintain with a separate IT group in-house – such as CRM apps, HR/HCM, Backup and Restore, Security etc. Instead of running these applications on your data center, you should consider using applications provided by third-party service providers. This, in turn, reduces the number of servers in your data center – which means you have less energy consumption.
Virtualize your data center
As you look for ways to optimize your data center operation, consolidation of servers through virtualization technology provides considerable energy savings. Virtualization is a technology that allows you to partition a physical hardware into multiple logical boxes, with each having its own operating system and network connectivity running in a sandbox. This makes additional standby servers redundant since you can dynamically provision a new virtual machine and then run a new instance of your application on this VM. With advances in virtual machine technology, you can now move a running virtual machine from one server to another server. This further increases the utilization rate of your server stack in the data center; hence you can host more applications with reduced number of servers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)