GlobalFoundries Sacks 5% of Workforce

Article By : Rick Merritt

Fresh CEO Caulfield making his first moves

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Globalfoundries has started a layoff aimed at trimming 5 percent of its workforce as part of its new focus on financial performance. The company does not plan to close any fabs or cut any of its existing services.

The layoffs will affect about 900 of GF’s 18,000 employees, “across a variety of functional areas and all geographies,” a company spokesman said. “We remain fully committed to delivering our roadmap,” he added.

The company informed workers of the cuts on Monday (June 11). It will offer a voluntary separation program it expects many people will accept.

The effort aims “to improve our global cost structure and minimize redundancies that have accrued from previous mergers and acquisitions” and could take several weeks to complete, the spokesman said.

GF is the world’s second largest pure-play foundry with 2017 revenues estimated at $5.86 billion by IC Insights. It started life as the spin out of AMD’s fabs, then acquired Chartered’s fabs in Singapore and IBM’s fabs in the U.S.

The company is dwarfed by the sector’s dominant player, TSMC, which reported sales of $32.2 billion in 2017. Samsung, the parent company of GF’s 14nm partner, is the world’s fourth-largest foundry, with about $4.8 billion in 2017 foundry revenue, according to IC Insights. 

GF is privately owned by the Mubadala Investment Company in the United Arab Emirates. In early March, the company named Tom Caulfield, the manager of its leading-edge fab in New York, as its new CEO, marking the shift to its tighter focus on financial performance.

— Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, EE Times