Semiconductor Firm Marvell To Lay Off 320 Employees: Here’s Where
As the global semiconductor market slows down in 2023, Marvell Technology is eliminating its entire R&D team in China.
Semiconductor company Marvell Technology is joining the ever-growing list of tech companies conducting layoffs by saying it will lay off 320 employees.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it will be laying off its entire R&D team in China, which will amount to approximately 4 percent of its roughly 8,000-strong global workforce.
“We are streamlining our organization to ensure that our workforce is positioned to take advantage of our most promising opportunities, both now and when we emerge from the current industry downcycle,” said Stacey Keegan, Marvell Technology’s vice president of corporate marketing and communications, in a statement.
[Related: Amazon’s AWS Layoffs: 5 Things To Know About ‘Devastating’ Cuts]
Marvell generated $5.9 billion in revenue for its fiscal year 2023, an increase of 33 percent year over year. However, the company reported a net loss of $163 million for the year. Marvell has international R&D centers in America, China, Europe, Israel and Singapore.
Keegan said Marvell will concentrate its resources in China “on customer-facing teams” to best support local customers and opportunities. The move has “resulted in the elimination of certain R&D roles,” she added.
Semiconductor Market Slowdown: $596 Billion
The semiconductor industry is expected to slow down in 2023.
The global semiconductor chip market is projected to decline nearly 4 percent in 2023, according to market research firm Gartner, from $618 billion in 2022 to $596 billion this year.
“The short-term outlook for semiconductor revenue has worsened,” said Richard Gordon, practice vice president at Gartner, in a press release last year. “Rapid deterioration in the global economy and weakening consumer demand will negatively impact the semiconductor market in 2023.”
Semiconductor giant Intel, for example, saw a 28 percent sales drop year over year during its recent fourth-quarter 2022. The company’s gross margin for the quarter was 44 percent, down 21 points year over year.
Tech Layoffs 2023
In January, Intel laid off around 550 employees in the state of California alone.
Intel said in October it will cut $3 billion in 2023 and as much as $10 billion in costs by 2025 in a move Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger had already said would impact head count.
The semiconductor chip industry is hardly the only tech sector conducting large layoffs in 2023.
Just this week, Amazon said it would lay off off 9,000 employees, including in its popular cloud computing business AWS. Microsoft this year said it will eliminate 10,000 employees in a single layoff round.
Atlassian, the project management software vendor behind tools Jira, Confluence and Trello, said this month it would lay off about 500 employes, or about 5 percent of its workforce.
It is key to note that Marvell also conducted a layoff round in October 2022, mostly in China. The Silicon Valley -based company provides advanced chips for cloud computing, 5G communications and enterprise networking applications.