SCO lays off staff to boost balance sheet
Published: 05 May 2004 09:05 BST
The SCO Group laid off a "small" number of employees late last week as part of an effort to make its Unix products group profitable, the company said on Tuesday.
Spokesman Blake Stowell declined to say how many were cut but said the layoff affected less than 10 percent of the company's staff, which totalled 275 employees before the cut. Jobs were eliminated across the company, including sales, marketing and engineering, he said.
The cuts took place at the end of the company's second fiscal quarter and were part of its goal "of trying to be profitable within our core business" -- selling the UnixWare and OpenServer Unix products, Stowell said. The company wants that business to be profitable by the end of the fiscal third quarter, which ends in July, Stowell said, not ruling out further cuts.
Stowell said the move wasn't influenced by the urging of one of SCO's major investors, BayStar Capital, which earlier in April said SCO should drop its Unix product business and pay more attention to its legal case against Linux. BayStar, which is seeking to withdraw its funding, also wants new management at SCO.
SCO named a new chief financial officer, Bert Young, in April. That move also was unrelated to BayStar's requests, Stowell said.
In its most recent quarter, SCO reported a net loss of $2.25m (£2.25m) on revenue of $11.4m. It garnered only $20,000 during the quarter from its SCOsource plan to extract revenue from its Unix intellectual property -- for example by charging or suing Linux users -- but said that revenue source will grow.
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