Texas Instruments officials have already said the company would be moving away from smartphone and tablet chips, instead focusing on the embedded markets including industrial devices and automotive computers.
Now the company is taking a major step in that direction by eliminating 1700 jobs. Reuters reports that’s about 5 percent of the company’s workforce.
The company will continue to develop its OMAP processor and wireless chips. But as we saw with the unveiling of 6 new OMAP 5 developer boards this week, the company is targeting embedded applications rather than consumer devices such as smartphones.
The mobile processor space has become awfully competitive over the last few years, with Qualcomm, Samsung, NVIDIA, and others duking it out.
While TI OMAP chips have powered some high profile devices such as the Amazon Kindle Fire and NOOK Tablet line of products as well as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, it looks like TI would rather take its ball and go play in a different arena — one where there are still higher profit margins to eke out.
Meanwhile, the move to eliminate 1700 jobs is designed to “reduce costs and focus investments.” One of the key benefits to working in the embedded market is that product life cycles tend to be longer — which means TI won’t have to develop new chips every 6 months just to keep up.
TI estimates the company will save about $450 million per year in cost-cutting through these job cuts.
via The Verge
What do they have left after this? Calculators?
For direct to consumer products, probably… Pretty much everything else deals with semiconductor design & manufacturing of parts.