SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Amid huge losses, ATE giant Advantest Corp. (Tokyo) plans to cut 1,200 jobs, or 24-to-26 percent of its headcount, by its fiscal year 2008, which ends March 31.
The cuts will include layoffs and a voluntary retirement program. Officials from Advantest said these are not new cuts. The company has been making cuts over the last year. (Editor note: Earlier, it was erroneously reported that Advantest would cut 3,400 jobs.)
''Measures include a 26 percent reduction in staff to 3,400, lower wages and no bonuses for those who remain, streamlining of production and software development, and comprehensive reduction of other costs,'' said Scott Foster, an analyst with the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp. Ltd. (HSBC), in a report.
Advantest has been hit hard by the ATE downturn. The memory and logic ATE markets have fallen off a cliff.
''Management's guidance (from Avantest) for (fiscal year 2008) includes a 59 percent decline in sales to 75 billion yen ($766.1 million), an operating loss of 50 billion yen ($510.7 million) after restructuring charges and a net loss of 78 billion yen ($796.7 million) after writing off deferred tax assets,'' Foster said.
Other ATE vendors are suffering, including Credence/LTX, Teradyne and Verigy.
Separately, Advantest, the world's leading supplier of semiconductor test equipment, said that MoSys Inc., a provider of system-on-chip (SoC) memory intellectual property (IP), has selected its T5781 Engineering Station (T5781ES) for design and debug of its next generation embedded memory technologies.
MoSys' products incorporate its patented technologies -- 1T-SRAM and 1T-Flash IP. MoSys selected Advantest's T5781ES for its ability to characterize new device technologies at speeds up to 500-MHz. The T5781ES is the laboratory complement to Advantest's T5781 memory test system.
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