Arris (Nasdaq: ARRS) laid off 500 employees this week, slightly more than two months after closing its $2.35 billion acquisition of Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Motorola set-top box business. The company reduced its global workforce to 6,500 from 7,000.
The cuts are not a huge surprise, as the two companies had redundancy between their product lines, including headend gear and cable modem products. At the time of the acquisition, Arris said it expected to generate between $100 million and $125 million in annual cost synergies.
Arris did not say which areas of the company would be impacted by the reduction in workforce, but it did say its goal from the acquisition was to bring the new Arris together and drive organizational efficiencies as well as align its business teams. "We understand how hard these changes will be for the employees concerned. ARRIS is committed to helping them through this difficult transition and will be providing severance packages, as well as outplacement services," the company said in a statement.
At the National Cable Show in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, Arris executives discussed the company's combined product portfolio, including development tools such as the Whole Home Solution, the Moxi User Interface, DreamGallery and more. In addition, the company announced that Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), which had been trialing the E6000 Converged Edge Router, would commercially deploy the technology. The E6000 is a key component in the Arris portfolio and helps operators migrate to an all-IP network. Arris executives said they expect most operators' networks to be all-IP in the next several years.
For more:
- see this Multichannel News article
- see this Light Reading article
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