HTC Confirms Job Cuts at U.S. Operations

Struggling Taiwanese phone maker HTC cut more than two dozen jobs at its U.S. offices on Friday.

The company said in a statement that the cuts were "a decisive action by HTC Corp (US) to streamline and optimize our organization and improve efficiencies after several years of aggressive growth."

HTC didn't offer details on the cuts or provide a specific number, but a source familiar with the situation said that about 30 positions were eliminated. No executives left, nor was there any significant shift in the types or amount of work being done in the U.S., according to an HTC representative.

"This is a hard decision that has direct impact on people who have contributed to the growth HTC has experienced the past several years," HTC said in its statement. "However, to achieve our long-term goals as a business and return maximum value to our shareholders, this is a necessary step to drive ongoing innovation."

After several years of strong growth, HTC has been trying to rebound from what has been a steep dropoff in sales of its smartphones. The company has also faced some turmoil at the corporate level, including the departure of several top executives.

As part of the turnaround push, HTC recently launched a new ad campaign starring Robert Downey Jr.

The job cuts were reported earlier by The Verge.

Amid Corporate Reorganization, Symantec Names Five New Execs

Last month, security software company Symantec confirmed a significant round of layoffs, amounting to about eight percent of its total headcount.

Today it starting adding back to that headcount with the naming of five new senior executives, including a chief marketing officer, a chief communications officer, a chief security officer and two senior VPs.

Announced in a corporate blog post earlier today, the five new execs are being brought on to execute a company-wide shift in direction instituted by Steve Bennett, Symantec's new CEO, who joined the company a year ago.

The new hires are:

• CMO Manny Kostas, a former SVP of marketing and strategy at Hewlett-Packard, who left after a shake-up last year. He has been working for Polycom since October.
  
• CCO Colleen Lacter, a veteran of PR agency Waggener Edstrom (better known as Microsoft's PR agency). She was involved in many significant product launches, including Windows 95, Internet Explorer, MSN and Bing.
• CSO Julie Talbot-Hubbard, previously chief information security officer at Ohio State University.
• Matt Lynch will be SVP for eBusiness. He was most recently COO at Amazon-owned IMBD.com. Stephen McHenry will be SVP for Cloud Platform Engineering. He's a Google veteran whose titles there have included CIO, CTO and engineering chancellor. His job will include building out Symantec's cloud computing infrastructure.

The hires are part of a broader shake-up that Symantec said was coming in a regulatory filing earlier this year. It said it plans to take charges related to its reorganization amounting to between $220 million and $250 million for the 2014 fiscal year ending next March. In June, it carried out the largest of a series of job cuts, eliminating about 1,700. Of those, 1,000 were supposed to have been cut in June, with the remaining cuts taking place this month.

Fab Hints at More Layoffs Amid Restructuring and Profitability Push

Fab CEO Jason Goldberg hinted in an email to his staff today that more layoffs may be on the horizon, as the company pursues becoming "the most loved company in the world." "Our processes are changing, along with our investments in technology that may impact the number of people required to perform various tasks," Goldberg wrote. "And at the same time, we are accelerating our path to profitability, with a commitment to get Fab profitable on our current financing by continuously optimizing our cost structure."

The Real Reason for Fab's Layoffs: A Big, Bad Bet on Flash Sales

"The Path to Profitability @Fab."

That's the title of a blog post published yesterday by Fab CEO Jason Goldberg, in which he explains his rationale for the company's most recent round of layoffs, which totaled 101 people, bringing total cuts at the e-commerce company over the last two months to more than 250 employees, or 37 percent of the staff.

"The impetus behind this decision is our plan to accelerate Fab's path to profitability," Goldberg's post read. "We are certain that driving towards a profitable Fab in the near-term is the way to build the best Fab for the long-term benefit of our customers."

So, in short, Goldberg's explanation is that Fab had to cut people, because it has decided - seemingly out of nowhere - that now is the time to focus on profitability over growth.

That push for profitability may indeed be a big factor in these moves.

But it's not the only reason.

What Goldberg didn't admit in the public explanation is that the company has had to drastically cut its headcount because it made a giant bet on being able to build a big, sustainable business over the long term around flash sales - the selling of a limited amount of product inventory that's available only for short periods of time, designed to spur impulse buying.

Fab pumped a ton of venture capital into this fad, pushing staff counts ever higher while acquiring companies overseas.

And that bet failed.

Fab recognized this, and has pivoted to a more traditional retail model where it sells products over a long period of time and holds that inventory itself so it can get it in the hands of its customers quicker. Goldberg has convinced enough investors to give Fab another chance - perhaps for the last time - raising more than $160 million in a Series D round to fund the transition. And it so happens that the new business model requires a smaller staff than the former model.

In acknowledging all of this, Goldberg could have also acknowledged that he, his exec team and board messed up; they made the wrong bet. But he didn't.

Asked for comment on Goldberg's layoffs explanation and what it left out, a Fab spokesperson said in an email to AllThingsD: "We acknowledge that flash sales is a flawed business model."

Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a member of Fab's board, agreed with that assessment.

"In a perfect world, we probably could have gotten here in a straighter line," he said.

But the company, he said, possesses a bunch of valuable assets it wouldn't have if not for the original flash-sales iteration of Fab: A large customer base, pretty good brand awareness and strong relationships with suppliers.

The one asset it has a lot less of today, though, as a result: Employees.

BlackBerry Sacks 250 Employees

They're swinging the axe again over at BlackBerry. The struggling smartphone pioneer, which last year cut thousands of jobs, cut a few hundred more earlier this week.

In a statement to AllThingsD, a BlackBerry spokesman confirmed that the company sacked 250 employees working at a Waterloo, Ontario, product-testing facility this past Tuesday.

"These employees were part of the New Product Testing Facility, a department that supports BlackBerry's manufacturing and R&D efforts," spokesman Alex Kinsella said. "This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing."

News of the layoffs follows a dismal first-quarter earnings report from BlackBerry, whose new BlackBerry 10 smartphones aren't gaining nearly the traction needed to pull the company out of the mud. BlackBerry employed about 12,000 workers as of March, following job cuts of about 5,000 last year.

Big Fish Games Restructures, Closing Offices and Replacing President

Update: This article previously stated that a Big Fish representative did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman's email confirming the story and clarifying the headcount at the two international offices was caught in a spam filter and did not reach us before publication.

Casual-game studio Big Fish Games will lay off 49 employees at its headquarters in Seattle, and has proposed closing offices in Vancouver and Ireland.

The Seattle Times obtained a letter to employees from CEO Paul Thelen, which stressed that the cuts are targeted, not the result of general problems. "2013 will be our 11th straight year of record revenue and we remain profitable with a positive cash flow," Thelen wrote.

The CEO singled out Big Fish's cloud game-streaming initiative, which launched last year, as due for closure: "This decision reflects the reality that the costs to support streaming cloud delivery of premium games are too high, and the user adoption too low, for us to warrant continued investment."

Projects begun in the Vancouver office will be consolidated into the Seattle location, which is the HQ for Big Fish's main business, premium and free-to-play casual games. The Seattle Times report says this consolidation means that the six employees affected by their office's shutdown will be offered the choice to continue working for Big Fish from Seattle. The Cork, Ireland, office's closure will hinge on a "30-day consultation" with its 89 employees, according to Thelen's letter.

The company's president, Dave Stephenson, will be replaced by COO John Holland, but Holland will remain COO.

Time Inc. Layoffs Will Cost $60 Million

Time Inc.’s move to lay off about 6 percent of its workforce will cost the company at least $60 million in restructuring charges this year.

Time Inc. corporate parent, Time Warner, disclosed the number as part of its guidance for its 2013 financials.

Restructuring charges aren’t new for Time Inc., because the publisher has been downsizing itself for years. In 2012, the company racked up $27 million in restructuring charges, up from $18 million in 2011.

Time Inc.’s Q4 numbers help explain why CEO Laura Lang is cutting some 500 jobs: Revenue was down 7 percent, to $967 million, and ad revenue was down 4 percent. But the publisher is still the world’s biggest, and it still makes piles of money: Operating income was down 3 percent, to $200 million.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes may have more to say about the future of his publishing unit during his call later this am; I’ll listen in.