January 10, 2002 — HONG KONG — Technology giant Motorola Inc. announced today that will cut 1,200 to 1,300 chip manufacturing jobs in Austin, Texas, and Sendai, Japan, as part of a cost-cutting move to consolidate production at its other plants.

The job cuts, to take place over nine to 15 months, are among the 4,000 semiconductor job cuts previously announced by the Illinois-based firm, spokeswoman Gloria Shiu said in Hong Kong.

Earlier this week the company said it would cut 700-800 chip manufacturing positions in Hong Kong.

The company, Shiu says, is also eliminating 2,000 sales and administrative jobs from its global chip operations, to bring the total semiconductor downsizing to 4,000.
“We just notified our employees in three other operations (beyond Hong Kong) that their manufacturing operations will also be transferred,” Shiu told Reuters.

In Sendai, Motorola will close the fabrication and final manufacturing operations at the TSC-8 line of its Tohoku Semiconductors Co unit. Motorola will also close its Sendai final manufacturing operation, which has 230 staff, and an assembly and test unit in Texas, the company said. However, the company said it would retain its chip design operation in Sendai.

Motorola said wafer fabrication work shifted to plants in Arizona and Scotland, as well as another Sendai facility. All the final assembly work will be moved to Motorola plants in Kuala Lumpur and Tianjin, China, Shiu said.

During 2001, Motorola announced a total of 48,400 job cuts — including those shifted to other firms — as it battles to recover from the downturn in the chip and wireless technology sectors.