Santa Ana’s Ingram Micro Inc., the top distributor of technology goods, software and consumer electronics, started a round of layoffs Tuesday that’s set to slash roughly 300 jobs.
Ingram, which is Orange County’s largest public company, is expecting to cut about 8% of its workforce in North America.
About 150 of the job cuts are coming at the company’s Santa Ana headquarters and other sites in the U.S., including about 100 at its Williamsville, N.Y., campus, according to CRN.com, the Web site of trade publication Computer Reseller News.
Another 50 cuts are coming in Canada.
“The 2009 plan has been changed almost weekly because of worsening macroeconomic conditions,” North America President Keith Bradley told CRN.com.
Local layoffs included at least one high ranking executive, Carol Kurimsky, who was vice president of marketing for North America.
Kurimsky’s job was eliminated after Ingram Micro rolled marketing efforts into its sales department.
Kurimsky, who reported to Bradley, ran a sort of mini-marketing agency within Ingram Micro that created marketing campaigns to help technology suppliers sell to resellers.
Ingram has been aggressively cutting costs since last year.
“Since we first began to experience the downturn in the economy nearly a year ago, we’ve made progress toward controlling our cost structure,” Bradley said in a memo to employees that went out Tuesday. “Unfortunately, the market conditions continue to deteriorate and the economy is not expected to recover in 2009.”
In the memo, Bradley outlined a plan to further reduce costs that’s set to be implemented “with a high sense of urgency.”
The plan includes eliminating positions that currently are open, reducing bonus programs and other sales incentives and lowering company contributions toward retirement savings.
The company also is set to move some 40 “transactional” jobs in finance and sales to its offices in the Philippines.
Ingram Micro’s distribution business nets pennies on the dollar. In recent years the company has diversified into doing more services for its reseller customers in order to boost profits.
It’s now getting squeezed from both sides as companies’ technology budgets shrink and demand for consumer electronics falls.
The company, which had a recent market value of about $2 billion, is set to report fourth-quarter results on Wednesday.
Wall Street analysts, on average, are expecting profits of $61 million on sales of $8.9 billion.
