Global technology job losses exceed 160,000

More IT workers than ever are looking for jobs

More than 160,000 jobs in the global technology sector have now been cut in the past six months.

The latest redundancies have come from Toshiba, losing 3,900 temporary jobs by March 2010 after forecasting an annual loss of 350bn yen (£2.4bn), and Sony Ericsson, which is shedding 2,000 people after reporting a loss of €358m (£316m) in the first quarter of the year.

The cuts bring the total figure, based on those reported by Computing since the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank – widely viewed as the turning point for the global recession – to more than 162,000. The true number is likely to be significantly higher through jobs lost but not announced to the press.

Even the biggest suppliers have not been immune, with Microsoft making its first ever redundancies. HP has tried to avoid extra cuts above the 25,000 removed as a result of its acquisition of EDS by introducing mandatory pay cuts – a move that has been heavily criticised by affected staff.

And the figures below do not take into account the thousands of IT professionals working for user organisations, especially in the financial services sector, who have lost their jobs as part of cost-cutting exercises. A true figure for user IT professionals out of work is hard to come by as many companies simply refer to "back office" cuts, which often include an unspecified number of IT staff.

The full list of announced job cuts from technology companies to date, in alphabetical order, are:

• Adobe 600
• AMD 1,100
• AT&T 12,000
• Autodesk 750
• BT 10,000
• Cisco 2,000
• Dell 1,900
• EMC 2,400
• Ericsson 5,000
• Google 2,000
• HP/EDS 25,000
• Lenovo 2,950
• Microsoft 5,000
• Motorola 4,000
• NEC 20,000
• Nokia 1,700
• Nortel 5,000
• Nvidia 360
• Panasonic 15,000
• Philips 6,000
• SAP 3,000
• Seagate 800
• Sony 8,000
• Sony Ericsson 2,000
• Sprint-Nextel 8,000
• Sun Microsystems 6,000
• Toshiba 3,900
• Unisys 1,300
• Viacom 850
• Virgin Media 2,200
• Vodafone 500
• Xerox 3,000
• Yahoo 1,500
  
  Total: 162,010

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