Hundreds of NetApp Employees Losing Jobs After Strong Q1

Hundreds of NetApp employees reportedly are getting pink slips as part of a transformation to drive growth.

Silicon Angle reports that NetApp is cutting 5% of its workforce. According to its latest annual report, NetApp’s workforce was 10,800 strong as of April 24.

That puts the number of jobs cut at 540.

After its first-quarter 2021 earnings call, NetApp sent the following statement:

“We continue to sharpen our focus on markets where we have both a significant presence and clear competitive advantage, specifically with our storage software and systems, and cloud data services. NetApp is realigning resources and investments to best capture these opportunities and position the company for long-term success.”

The company also said the changes are a “continuation of the transformation we are undertaking as we focus on driving growth for more customers globally by enabling their digital transformations and cloud journeys.”

The layoffs are neither motivated by corporate-level cost cutting nor COVID-19 concerns, NetApp said.

“Decisions that impact people are always difficult,” it said. “Our leadership team has carefully worked to make decisions that are aligned with our strategy. We have redeployed employees in impacted roles to open positions where possible. We also provided impacted employees with a comprehensive package to support them through these difficult circumstances.”

Dell Technologies, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, IBM, Pure Storate and Nutanix are NetApp’s biggest competitors, according to the company’s annual report.

Better-than-Expected Earnings

NetApp’s George Kurian

For its first quarter of 2021, NetApp reported a $77 million profit on revenue of $1.3 billion, up from $1.24 billion for the year-ago quarter. That was better than expected news.

“We executed well in the first quarter,” said George Kurian, NetApp’s CEO. “Enterprises are increasingly prioritizing transformational and hybrid cloud projects, which drove our momentum as customers turn to NetApp to help them achieve these goals. We are building on a strong foundation of industry-leading data-centric software innovation, trusted customer relationships and an open-ecosystem approach that is strengthened by partnerships with the leading public cloud companies who endorse our data fabric strategy.”