SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Cisco Systems is going to be much leaner by the end of the summer as the networking equipment giant is to lay off 14,000 employees, or close to 20 percent of its workforce.
The technology news publication CRN first reported the job cuts late Tuesday, citing "sources close to the company" as saying Cisco would implement the layoffs over the next few weeks. It would be the biggest one-time job cut in Cisco's history.
Cisco had around 73,000 employees at the end of April, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The layoffs also stand to be the biggest imprint of Chuck Robbins tenure as Cisco's chief executive. Robbins, who took over from longtime CEO John Chambers in July 2015, has been working to move Cisco more into software, services, cloud-based networking and security technologies as the company's bellwether hardware business has shown signs of slowing down in recent years.
The report of Cisco's big job cuts also were expected to lend some excitement to the company's fiscal fourth-quarter results, due after the stock market closes Wednesday. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters have forecast Cisco to earn 60 cents a share, excluding one-time items, on revenue of $12.6 billion for the period that ended in July. During the same quarter a year ago, Cisco earned 59 cents a share on $12.8 billion in sales.
Announcing the layoffs at the same time of its fiscal fourth-quarter results wouldn't be unprecedented for Cisco, as the company implemented layoffs at the end of its 2013 and 2014 fiscal years, and at the end of the other past fiscal years.
Cisco would be the latest Bay Area tech titan to put big job cuts into effect, following HP Inc., which in September 2015 said it would cut 33,000 jobs over a three-year-period, and Intel's announcement in April that it would shed 12,000 jobs this year.
Cisco has re-gained some faith from investors of late, as the company's shares have risen more than 14 percent this year to $31.12.
