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Hi-tech firms feel meltdown blues

By Wang Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-02-20 08:01

Hi-tech workers have also started feeling the pinch of the economic downturn with layoffs reaching a historical high.

Workers at a factory in Dongguan assemble phone handsets. [Bloomberg News]

Chen Lei, spokesman, Motorola, confirmed that Motorola China would be impacted by the company's plan to cut 4,000 employees globally. Of this 3,000 are in the company's handset department. Chen, however, declined to disclose how many people would be laid off in China.

Related readings:  Millions of the laid-off get retrained  China to launch survey on labor force  Economy fears trim employee turnover

As one of the largest hi-tech companies, Motorola entered China in 1987. The company now has over 10,000 employees in the country, the world's largest mobile phone market.

Earlier reports had said that Motorola plans to cut nearly 1,000 employees in China after it reported a fourth-quarter loss of $3.6 billion.

Besides Motorola, Intel Corp, the world's largest computer chipmaker, said earlier this month that it would move its Shanghai chip-testing and assembly operations to Chengdu, a city in Southwest China. The announcement was in line with the company's efforts to shutter plants and cut 5,000 employees worldwide to cope with the slowdown.

The plan to shift base to Chengdu is expected to be undertaken over the next year and will affect around 2,000 workers, who have the option to take up jobs in Chengdu, where Intel already has a test and assembly plant, or in Dalian, a port city in Northeast China where the company is building a chip-making plant.

"Despite the announcement, Intel's commitment to China remains unchanged," said the company. Intel has over 6,000 employees in China.

According to figures from Layoff Trackers, a public service website designed to track mass layoffs and corporate downsizing, the total number of layoffs in tech firms since the financial crisis began has surpassed 300,000 globally. Of these, one-third lost their jobs within the last three weeks.

Almost all the big IT giants such as Microsoft, Cisco, Panasonic, NEC and Google, were on the layoff list. They all have large number of employees at their Chinese units.