I don’t know. I think the layoffs (if true) would have to do more with all the acquisitions they’ve made and overlap. Just looking at connectivity, they’ve bought at least 3 decent sized companies with huge overlap, and I’m guessing they must have at least 2 teams internally competing against each other to build similar products.
So I would think the bulk of the cuts will be thin out duplication from it’s CSR and Atheros and Wilocity, etc, etc, etc acquisitions. That’s 3 companies under their roof doing bluetooth, 3 companies under their roof doing wifi, not to mention all the other tiny companies they bought that aren’t even worth mentioning. So most of the cuts, I’m guessing will come out of the other locations such as the Bay Area. And I think the Bay Area job market is so good right now, it’s really not a big deal for those people that are impacted up there.
High end phones might be saturating, but low cost phones have yet to pick up in China. And Q’s in a pretty good position there relative to all the other players (MediaTek is #2, but it’s not even close.) They’ll probably see more margin compression on the low/mid end, but provided they can maintain an edge over MediaTek, I think they aren’t going away anytime soon. The name of the game there is volume.
Also, Q is cash-flushed, so I wouldn’t be surprised if these go on an acquisition spree, particularly in RF components, where the margins are pretty good.
If I were to bet, I’d say the bulk of the cuts are going to be from the acquistions, not in headquarters, and the cuts here in SD probably will be “for performance reasons” (whether that is really true or just to cut people with personality conflicts)
The bigger question I’m wondering is what Avago does it’s recent acquisition, particularly the connectivity group in SD. Oh well, not my concern…
