. . . The company employs 31,000 workers worldwide, including more than 15,000 in San Diego. Two- thirds of its workers are engineers. Its last layoff occurred in December, when about 600 employees were let go.
In addition to San Diego, Qualcomm also has roughly 3,000 workers in the Bay Area from its 2011 acquisition of Wi-Fi chip maker Atheros. Other locations include Colorado, New England, North Carolina, New Jersey and Texas, as well as overseas.
The cuts are expected to occur across the board, impacting all business units. According to employees, the cuts have been characterized as a pruning but not a fundamental change in the way the company operates….
In the US alone, Qualcomm has 7 locations, including SD, which has the most employees (16K).
According to the article, QC’s roughly 4K in employee cuts will be worldwide. Assuming arguendo that they won’t cut employees in countries where wages are much lower than the US, 4K out of 31K employees is about 12% of its workforce. If the cuts are across the board, then 12% of its 16K SD workforce = 1920 employees. A handful of those employees also have other household members working at QC. So let’s say 1900 SD households are affected adversely by layoff (primary breadwinner of hshld). Let’s assume 75% of them are homeowners or 1425 of them. We should also assume that a large fraction of these layoffs could be forced retirements of longtime employees who may have their homes paid off or nearly paid off. A large fraction of the laid off employees may also have other household members working FT who are making just as much or more than they are.
Even if ~2500 employees are laid off in SD, I don’t think QC’s actions will cause cratering of property values, even in zip codes close to their HQ. I don’t believe that the majority of QC employees who are homeowners live in the same or an adjacent zip code as QC. Perhaps employees who are renters generally do but not homeowners. It didn’t always take as long as it does today to get to QC from various parts of the county. I feel that many/most? longtime homeowners who were in QC’s original groups of employees and have not yet retired actually never moved since their hire (or since they bought a home shortly after their hire) and still live in their original homes.
So I just don’t see where SD’s housing market will be affected at all by what happens at QC this year. I predict that whatever the effect of SD’s housing market in relation to whatever QC decides to do with its SD employees will be a drop in the bucket. At the very most, a few more listings may trickle on the market from lower-rung more newly-hired employees who can’t sustain themselves without their QC job … that is, from the laid off ones who are actually homeowners. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
