Qualcomm has just notified the California Employment Development Department that it’s eliminating 1,258 positions within the state, according to Bloomberg. That’s around 2.5 percent of the company’s entire workforce, which is approximately 50,000 strong, but the job cuts will only affect workers from Qualcomm’s San Diego and Santa Clara, California offices. Based on Bloomberg’s report, no position is safe: More than 750 of the affected employees will reportedly come from the chipmaker’s engineering team, including director-level personnel. The remaining affected roles will come from across different departments and will include internal technical and accounting staff.
The chipmaker is required by law to notify the California agency of impending job cuts. But since many other places don’t have the same rule, it’s unclear if Qualcomm is planning to eliminate positions in other offices within and outside the US. It’s worth noting that these job cuts, while unfortunate, don’t come as a surprise: The company announced in its quarterly earnings report (PDF) released in August that it was going to take “additional restructuring actions.”
Back then, the chipmaker had admitted that it expects these “restructuring actions” to consist “largely of workforce reductions.” It said that the move will enable it to make “continued investments in key growth and diversification opportunities” in the face of “continued uncertainty in the macroeconomic and demand environment.” As Bloomberg notes, Qualcomm still makes most of its money from smartphone sales, and market performance continues to decline. In fact, analysts said global smartphone shipments for the year are on track to be the worst in a decade. Qualcomm itself could see its revenue shrink by roughly 19 percent in the current fiscal year.
The company will start removing personnel sometime in mid-December, and it expects to be done with the restructuring changes it has to make in the first half of fiscal year 2024.
