back to article Chips are down at Broadcom: Thousands of workers laid off

Broadcom is exiting the cellular baseband business, a decision that's has bitten hard, with the company announcing layoffs of around 2,500 employees – around 20 per cent of its total workforce – worldwide. Its latest SEC filing shows the company turned in a loss of $US1 million for the quarter, a collapse from the previous …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cellphones are selling like hotcakes and these guys still can't make a profit selling chips for them? Something seems odd...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Its because of Qualcomm

      They're just totally dominating this business. They're not quite the Intel of the baseband chipset world, but they aren't far off.

      The more interesting question is what will become of their engineers. Rumor had it Apple was hiring some of these guys. It would seem odd for Apple to design its own baseband, but I guess considering they hired a bunch of GPU guys a couple years ago and will probably include their own GPU design in this fall's or next fall's iPhone, maybe they want to eventually control the design of everything inside the iPhone.

  2. B-D

    I would imagine that cellular baseband would cover marine and military applications whereas mobile phones now use SoCs where the Cell transciever, WiFi, Bluetooth and NFC systems all live in the same package.

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. Andus McCoatover
    Unhappy

    Double whammy for Oulu

    Reported in the local rag "Kaleva" (Kaleva.fi - in Finnish, natch), a double whammy in a week for my city, Oulu. First, 500 from Microsoft when the Peltola site closes, then another 430 from Broadcom...

    This city aint that big....A significant loss, almost 1,000 unemployed.

    1. Down not across

      Re: Double whammy for Oulu

      That sucks. Really sucks. There are, I guess, bit over 100k or so in and around Oulu. So that's creeping up to nearly 1% additional unemployed.

  5. Mage Silver badge

    Very sad

    Depressing really.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like