Broadcom axes CA Technologies staff in large-scale layoffs following $19bn acquisition

Monday: Broadcom CEO "welcomes" CA staff into "the Broadcom family". Friday: Mass layoffs reported

Following on from one of the oddest ever big-money acquisitions in the technology sector - chip-maker Broadcom's $18.9bn purchase of legacy software vendor CA Technologies - reports have emerged of large-scale lay-offs.

It is believed that as many as 2,000 of CA Technologies 5,000 US staff could be made redundant - around 40 per cent of the total. That's according to employee postings on TheLayoff.com website.

In a statement to The Register, Broadcom suggested that the layoffs were required to "align skills and resources". It admitted that it was making staff reductions in "select areas of the company".

In the UK, according to comments on The Register, almost two-thirds will be made redundant, with 242 staff out of 373 current employees being made redundant.

Broadcom only closed the acquisition of CA Technologies on Monday this week. Then, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan welcomed "the outstanding team of employees at CA to the Broadcom family".

According to Newsday [GDPR redacted website], Broadcom is laying off just under 2,000 of the company's 4,837 staff. "On Wednesday, Broadcom sent emails to all U.S. employees of its CA unit, designating 40.9 percent for layoffs and severance packages and the remaining 2,861 for retention," it reported.

The affected staff in the US have been told that they are being made redundant today, but effective from 8 February 2019.

Staff at the DevOps software vendor Veracode, which CA Technologies only acquired in March 2017 for $614 million, have escaped the layoffs after the company was split off and sold-on to private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $950 million earlier this week.

For CA as a company, it's no doubt a case of ‘what goes around, comes around'. Founded by Charles Wang in the mid-1970s, Wang perfected a business strategy of acquiring mainframe software vendors with a captive customer base, and slashing costs and hiking prices.

The strategy helped make CA a top-ten global software company, but few friends. The company's growth came to a juddering halt in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the company accused of mis-stating more than $500 million in revenue. Wang's replacement as CEO, Sanjay Kumar, was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud for his role in the accounting scandal.

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