While the nation’s top three automobile giants are trying to convince the government that they need a bailout, other businesses are doing what they can to stay afloat even if it means slashing thousands of positions.
Today, Sony joined the growing list of companies who have had to cut a percentage of their workforce to stay competitive. Sony announced Tuesday that it will slash 8,000 positions between now and March 2010 in its electronics business, cut operation costs, and cut inventory.
Cutting four percent of its 185,000 global workforce and an additional 8,000 temporary positions (not counted in its workforce number) is expected to save Sony $1 billion (92.5 billion yen) a year by the end of March 2010. Sony’s consolidated annual sales for the fiscal year ending March 31 were $88.7 billion and consolidated sales in the U.S. for the same period were $29 billion.
The recession has hit the U.S., Japan and Europe and the company does not know how long it will last, Naofumi Hara, a senior vice president at Sony, told the Associated Press.
The announcement of job cuts comes after the company tapped Howard Stringer, the first non-Japanese executive to lead the company. Stringer was well on his way in helping the company, but the recession put a kink in plans to grow sales of everything from LCD TVs to the popular PlayStation gaming console.
Sony joins a growing list of companies that have recently slashed positions, including AT&T, DuPont, Viacom, Circuit City, and Adobe Systems.
The Japanese electronics maker is putting the squeeze on several things. Sony said it will reduce or postpone planned investments and outsource its planned increase in manufacturing of CMOS image sensors for mobile phones.
Televisions made by Sony will also be affected, as the company plans to stop production at…