Daily Digest 14 November

14-11-2008

by Deirdre McArdle

Sun Microsystems to slash up to 6,000 jobs | Customers up but ARPU drops at O2

The latest multinational to announce major job cuts is Sun Microsystems, which on Friday said it was to cut between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs, or 15 percent to 18 percent of its workforce. The tech giant said the job cuts will help it to reduce costs by between USD700 million and USD800 million annually. For its first fiscal quarter to the end of September Sun posted a USD1.68 billion loss and has been under pressure since then to make some drastic changes at the company.

In a surprise announcement, Finnish mobile giant Nokia has lowered its outlook for the fourth quarter, saying that sales and profitability at its core devices and services business would be hit by the downturn. As a result Nokia said it would be making additional cost-cutting measures, including reining in the use of external contractors and services. Nokia also said it expects fourth-quarter industry handset volumes to be 330 million units, up from a previous estimate it made in the third quarter of 310 million units. For the year, Nokia now expects a volume of 1.24 billion phones, down from the 1.26 billion it estimated in October.

Following an ABCe audit, community website Boards.ie has been able to confirm that it is now the second most visited website in Ireland, after RTE.ie. For the month of September Boards.ie received more than 1.7 million unique visitors and over 22 million page impressions. The ABCe audit has been used to independently verify Boards.ie's website traffic figures to industry-agreed standards.

In a similar tale to Vodafone Ireland's KPIs on Tuesday, O2 Ireland has seen its customer base increase but its ARPU (average revenue per user) drop. The number of O2 Ireland subscribers grew by 26,000 during the third quarter to 1.713 million. As competition increases in the market many operators have seen a decline in ARPU and O2 is no exception. The operator saw average user revenue drop by 7 percent to EUR43.70, from EUR47 for the same period last year. The operator currently has 82,000 subscribers to its mobile broadband service.

Microsoft has launched an online store where customers can download the firm's software and US users can buy Microsoft hardware products. Initially the Microsoft Store will be available to customers in the UK, Germany, the US and Korea, with more countries coming on board through the year, according to the firm. Meanwhile, Yahoo has unveiled Yahoo Deals, which features daily deals from sites like Amazon, Woot, Home Depot, Dell and Sony Style and sorts them out by product category or store. The site is currently in beta.