Another 980 employees, 800 of them permanent, in Singapore, 180 temporaries in Watsonville, California, are to go from Seagate Technology Inc’s 27,000 worldwide workforce as the Scotts Valley company struggles to recover from the excess inventory problems that hit it during the summer. The company’s measures to bring output down to the level of demand meant that it produced 1.3m disk drives in its fiscal first quarter, down from 2m in the June quarter. Seagate’s problems are in part put down to its tardiness in switching to 3.5 from 5.25 disk drives, but its new 3.5 Winchesters are already the subject of an order from Apple Computer Inc for the Macintosh SE, and a major order from IBM is expected any day now.
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