Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Hitachi cut jobs.
  08/27/2001 10:28:12 AM MDT Albuquerque, Nm
  By Dustin D. Brand; Owner AMO

The biggest Japanese electronics makers cut jobs in a big way.   In the same week, Hitachi and Toshiba announced huge job cuts. Hitachi said Monday it was reviewing its profit forecasts and may consider job cuts or other restructuring measures based on revised figures, following weekend news reports that it was also planning about 20,000 job cuts.

  Toshiba plans to cut 18,000 jobs over 2 years. In contrast to Fujitsu, Toshiba plans to cut the jobs in their domestic operations in Japan. Toshiba's domestic factories, will have 17,000 out of 18,800 lost jobs but, as the company shifts manufacturing overseas to cut costs.

  Fujitsu plans to cut 11,400 workers jobs abroad while cutting only 5,000 jobs at home.

  Part of the cause for such strong loss in business and being forced to cut Japanese jobs is strong competition from abroad South Korean and Taiwanese Chipmakers. In fact, DRAM memory chip prices have fallen 90% due to strong competition from South Korean and Taiwanese Chipmakers.

  The Nihon Keizai Shimbun business daily said Toshiba was in talks on combining memory-chip operations with those of Infineon Technologies, Europe's No. 2 chipmaker, and planned soon to open talks with South Korea's Samsung Electronics, the world's top DRAM producer. Infineon acknowledged it was discussing cooperation with Toshiba in memory chips, although a Samsung spokesman said his company had received no contact from the Japanese firm Toshiba.

  Only 4 months ago Toshiba projected a yearly profit of $500 Million. Now Toshiba plans a record loss of nearly $1 billion. Toshiba now plans to close or consolidate six of it's 21 domestic plants by March 2002. With this action plan, we want to regenerate the company," Toshiba President Tadashi Okamura told a news conference.

  The Japanese economy has long been viewed as unstable, and these new job cuts will certainly have their toll. Japanese hardware/software maker Nintendo has also announced poor business and an attempt to restructure the company which is now trailing Sony in sales and faces stiff competition from newcomer Microsoft.