Ingram Micro Lays Off 8 Percent Of North American Employees

Ingram Micro laid off 8 percent of its North American workforce Tuesday, about 300 employees.

Among the cuts was Carol Kurimsky, vice president of marketing, who was selected as one of the 50 Most Powerful Women in the Channel by Everything Channel in 2007 and 2008.

Keith Bradley, president of Ingram Micro North America, said the layoffs wouldn't impact the company's relationships with VARs or vendors.

"There will not be a service-level degradation to any customer. We've taken the last two months to work on this," Bradley said. "We're making adjustments to where we see activity levels."

Ingram Micro canceled several external meetings with vendors and VARs Tuesday as a result of the layoffs.

"Our main priority today was to talk to our impacted associates first and then non-impacted associates. In addition, we are calling vendors and reseller partners. There are outbound calls being made today," he said.

About 100 employees were let go in the company's Williamsville, N.Y., campus, another 50 in Canada and 150 more spread across the company's Santa Ana, Calif., corporate headquarters and other centers in the United States.

Ingram Micro informed its employees early Tuesday, and asked a number of those being laid off to stay on board through a transition to ensure there are no service disruptions to customers.

The moves are a response to the continued economic slowdown across the world, Bradley said.

"Last year was a little softer than all of us had hoped for. We had decent growth in the first quarter and the second quarter and the third quarter. But as we all headed into Q4, we saw things begin to soften and that has gotten progressively worse all over the world as newspapers and television have indicated," he said.

Ingram Micro traditionally concludes its business plan for the next year in November, but the 2009 plan has been changed almost weekly because of worsening macroeconomic conditions, Bradley said.

"We had been managing operating expenses through natural attrition and managing expenses pretty aggressively. Given what we now see for 2009, we wanted to maintain our level of profitability and we had to come up with some incremental actions," he said.

Ingram Micro plans to release its fourth-quarter financials Wednesday, after the market closes. Shares of the company's stock were down 30 cents, or 2.4 percent, to $12.37 in Tuesday afternoon trading. Ingram Micro was faring better than the overall market, as the Dow Jones was off 3.4 percent and Nasdaq 3.7 percent.

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