Symantec Layoffs 2019: 200 Lose Jobs By Oct. In Restructuring Effort

Cybersecurity major Symantec will cut almost 200 jobs soon. They include 152 jobs at its Mountain View headquarters, 18 positions in San Francisco, and 36 jobs at Culver City in Los Angeles County.

This was revealed in a California filing that said employees have been notified of the layoffs and the outgoing workers’ employment will end on October 15.

Symantec employs more than 11,000 personnel worldwide and serves more than 50 million customers with Norton antivirus software and LifeLock identity theft protection.

According to Symantec news, Symantec has also decided to sell its enterprise division to chipmaker Broadcom.

On August 8, it disclosed that it would cut jobs after citing a goal to reduce personnel strength by 7 percent through next March.

Restructuring to become more competitive

The rationale of job cuts came from Vincent Pilette, Symantec’s chief financial officer when he held a conference call with analysts on Aug. 9.

The CFO said: “As part of our plan we developed over the last couple of months, we have announced a $100 million restructuring program aimed at improving productivity and reducing complexity in the way we manage the business.”

According to reports, the company would downsize, close certain facilities and shut many data centers.

The costs for the restructuring may be approximately $200 million and cover expenditure on site closures and payout of severance benefits.

The company did not respond to media requests for comment on the layoffs.

Symantec stock fell to a low of $17.98 in June. However, shares jumped 1.2 percent on Wednesday.

According to a CNBC report, Symantec shares jumped as much as 7 percent on Sept.6 following a report that said private-equity firms Permira and Advent International have expressed interest in buying the company for $27 per share.

In December, there were many high-level departures in Symantec. Its president and two other top executives left the company without assigning reasons. A board member, Rick Hill took over as interim CEO in May.

Impact of competition on market shares

The competitors to Symantec include vendors such as McAfee, IBM, Trend Micro, Kaspersky, Microsoft, Sophos, ESET, Bitdefender, Malwarebytes, and Cisco. Kaspersky antivirus has now extended to the gaming domain as well with anti-cheat software.

In the Enterprise Security division, Symantec lost some market share in the second quarter of 2019 and is now keeping 16.7 percent market share.

Broadcom will buy Symantec Corp’s enterprise security unit for $10.7 billion. Broadcom was in the news when its takeover of Qualcomm failed. Later it acquired software maker CA Technologies for $19 billion saying it wanted to diversify the revenue stream.