Numerous reports are indicating Seagate plans to cut more staff as a result of poor financial results. And, it is starting with CEO Steve Luczo, who has been with the company since 1984.
The 60-year Stanford graduate was in his second stint as CEO. His first time as CEO started in 1998. He left that position in 2004. Then in 2009 the Seagate board of directors asked him to replace the then CEO Bill Watkins. Luczo was the driving force for the Conner Peripherals acquisition in 1997 that ended up making Seagate the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drives. Dave Mosley, Seagate’s current president and COO has been asked to replace Luczo on Oct. 1st.
The Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor’s sales for the last quarter drop approximately nine per cent. The company still managed more than $2 billion in sales for the quarter.
For the longest time Seagate was the largest hard drive maker in the world. But as of the 2012 Western Digital/Hitachi deal, Western Digital is now considered to be the biggest since it was the No. 2 player in the market coming together with the No. 3 vendor.
Seagate went on record saying it would reduce the workforce by 600 people. The worldwide headcout is just over 45,000. The company has already trimmed its staff by 6,500 in 2016.
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Earlier this year, Seagate shut down one of its HDD assembly plants.
Seagate in the last three years has been on an acqusition shopping spree making deals with five companies totalling more than $1.5 billion. Seagate acquired Xyratex for storage systems, LSI for PCIe flash and SSD controller, and Dot Hill Systems for software and hardware storage systems.
All this came after acquiring Samsung’s hard disk business back in 2011. The company also was hit with class action lawsuit on alleged defective hard drives last year, while it was showing off its massive 60 T-Byte SSD solution.