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Owners are ready to begin in estors alsosol e the economic crisis and the question o the tradeThe men and women they are also customersBut two players ha e already made an e ortAre a commitment is more important but barelyTheir engagement is not de oid o other contradictionsDespite a reco ery o pri ate consumption 2In April the two countries ha e traded or goods 37 billion hal o its assets in the mediaA note that summarizes the opinion o many obser ers"We will remo e up to 5,000 jobs in departments R & D, marketing, sales, inance, legal, human resources and in ormation technology o er the next eighteen months, including 1,400 inter ene today," announced yesterday morning the Microso t CEO, Ste e Ballmer, in an e-mail sent yesterday to the 96.000 employees o the group just be ore the opening o Wall Street. This restructuring plan is the most important e er hired by the company o Redmond: it will a ect 5 o its work orce. Three times less, o course, that that pro ided the most alarmist rumours, which projected 15,000 deletions o posts ("Les Echos" rom January 16).
But this bleeding is unprecedented in the history o the group created in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Apart rom ery sparse and point deletions made in the past in some di isions, Microso t had ne er taken such a measure. E en a ter the collapse o the dot-com bubble. It must be said that the multinational has seen its population increase by 50 since 2005 and that it has e en hired 12,700 people in the past year.
Howe er the personal computing market marked a net coup case o end o 2008: the three months o the year, global sales o personal computers ha e stagnated ( 0.4), according to IDC, or the irst time since 2001. Microso t, which the other so tware and operating systems are installed in more than 90 o the PC, su ered the immediate contre-coup: rom October to December period that corresponds to the deuixème quarter o its iscal year 2008-2009, the group saw its net pro it orecast to decrease by 11.3, 4.1 billion (3.2 billion). The Redmond giant pro its remain ob iously com ortable. But, o er the same period, the turno er o the Windows editor has increased 1.6, to $ 16.6 billion.
To ind a decrease in the pro itability in the accounts o Microso t, he must go back to the collapse o the dot-com bubble: in the last quarter o the year 2000-2001, the net pro it o the company had allen by 97, but or purely inancial reasons (impairment o assets). It is still ar rom a such underper ormance. But under the combined e ect o the global economic crisis and the stagnation o sales o personal computers, Microso t has decided to take the lead. The goal or the number one world o so tware is or "reduce annual expenditures o approximately $ 1.5 billion company operating and reduce the iscal year 2009 o $ 700 million in estment. To some obser ers, it was time to respond: "I was hoping that an intelligent and thought ul leadership would ha e understood long already that we ha e doubled our sta much too quickly." Instead we' e let the storm o the global economic crisis we bullying and here us in reacti e mode. "Microso t can do better than this," writes the author o the blog Mini-Microso t, an employee o the giant o the so tware which is clearly not part o the cart o redundancies.
"NET so tware client business declined 8 due to the weakness o the market or the PC and the ailo er to"netbooks"discount", acknowledged the group, commenting on its quarterly results. In contrast, annual contracts related to ser ers and maintenance re enues increased 15 and those o entertainment de ices, such as the Xbox 360 game console, 3. "While we are not immune rom the agaries o the economy, I am con ident in the strength o our product range and the correctness o our approach", Ste e Ballmer said in the release o the results. Indeed, the CEO o Microso t stated in its memorandum that the group will proceed with hires by 2010, which will bring back to term net deletions to 2,000 or 3,000 jobs.
