SiliconBeat

If you were going to put out a release you hoped few would notice, a Thursday eve prior to the July 4th holiday and a long weekend would seem as good time as you could find. That’s when Catapult Communications of Mountain View chose to tell the world that it expects to report sales of $8.5 million for its third fiscal quarter ended Monday. That’s down about 14 percent from the company’s original estimate of $9.9 million.

Richard Karp, the company’s chief executive said that although the results will be Read the rest of this entry »

Technology aside, one of Hewlett Packard’s biggest exports over the past few years has been its employees. According to the 10-K the company filed on Tuesday, HP has had at least six rounds of restructurings since 2001. A story we ran last December counted 45,000 announced layoffs.

We fire, because we care. And to save money. But you have to spend money to save money, as they say.

And according to the annual report, those ongoing restructurings have now cost $6.337 billion, in cash and non-cash charges. (The latest chart doesn’t break out how it divides between each).

Okay, but at least HP is a lean, mean fighting machine, right?

Not exactly. Latest headcount from the filing: 172,000 employees worldwide as of October 31, 2007.

Compare that to:
2006: 156,000 employees
2005: 150,000 employees
2004: 151,000 employees

It’s called churn. And while it might make some employees nauseous, it’s been great for HP’s stock, which closed at $51.02 on Tuesday, up from less than $30 per share two years ago. Revenues clocked in at $104.3 billion, up from $86.7 billion two years ago. And profit is up to $7.3 billion from $2.4 billion two years ago.

Little more than a month after signing off on his first quarterly earnings filing for Nektar
Therapeutics, the San Carlos company he joined as chief financial officer in August, Tim
Harkness is gone.

If you hadn’t read to the bottom of the press release the company put out Tuesday announcing the promotion of John Nicholson, Nektar’s former vice president in charge of corporate development and business operations, to the post of chief financial officer you might have missed this line: “The previous Nektar CFO, Tim Harkness, is no longer with the company.” Nektar’s chief executive, Howard Robin, did add, “We thank Tim for his service to the company.”

Here’s what Robin had to say when Harkness, formerly with Molecular Devices, was hired in August. “With his strong understanding of healthcare and finance, Tim is a critical addition to the leadership team at Nektar.”

If Harkness was terminated by the company without cause or if he quite “”for good reason” he , would get “at a minimum” a cash severance payment equal to his
total annual cash compensation target including base salary and his bonus target, which could have totaled more than $1 million, according to his offer.

As of the time of this posting the company had yet to file any news or details about his departure.

Founded in 1990, Nektar is currently in trials with a drug to treat pneumonia that is
contracted in a hospital. It lost $19 million in its most recent quarter ending in September on $56.3 million in revenue, according to the only Nektar 10-Q Harkness ever prepared.  In its time on Earth, Nektar has accumulated $1.13 billion in losses.

Nektar’s board approved a plan in May to reduce its workforce by 25 percent, or 180 employees. at an estimated cost of $8.4 million.

Nektar shares took a dive in October after drug giant Pfizer said it would stop selling Exubera, the groundbreaking inhaled insulin treatment developed by Nektar, because of lackluster sales, and take a $2.8 billion write-off in Exubera-related costs.

The same day it announced buying back 2.1 million shares and completing the last $50 million worth of a $100 million stock buyback approved a year ago, Macrovision said it intends to buy back $60 million more.

Shares of Macrovision closed Tuesday at $23.04, little changed since the $100 million buyback was approved in August 2006.

“The repurchase program reflects our efforts to return value to our stockholders,” said
Chief Financial Officer James Budge in a statement.

Among the stockholders getting some value returned would be the company’s chief executive, Alfred Amoroso, who sold Macrovision shares earlier this month for the first time since joining the company in July 2005. He sold 31,250 shares of restricted stock for $741,461, for an average of $23.73 per share, at his first opportunity following their vesting on Saturday, Sept. 1.

Read the rest of this entry »

It might not be the dot-com boom, but it’s sure feeling like old times again at Cisco Systems. In a 10-K filed on Tuesday, the company disclosed that it hired 11,609 people in fiscal year 2007, which ends in June. The company now has a total headcount of 61,535. Those new employees included 3,300 who were assimilated through various mergers.

The good news is that this hiring binge is expected to continue, according to the filing, though how much will be in Silicon Valley is hard to say. According to its financials, Cisco’s fastest growth last year occurred in “emerging markets” such as Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and Eastern Europe. So if you’re having trouble landing a job in the South Bay, maybe it’s time to grab your backpack and Let’s Go guide and head off to exotic lands.