Troubled supplier Renesas to shed 17% of work force
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TOKYO (Bloomberg) -- Renesas Electronics Corp., the world's top maker of microcontroller chips for cars, will let about 17 percent of its work force leave through an early-retirement program as the unprofitable company seeks to restructure.
Renesas received 7,511 buyout applications from workers and the company will accept all of them, it said in a statement to the Tokyo Stock Exchange today.
The manufacturer will take a 85 billion-yen ($1.1 billion) charge in the fiscal second quarter for the worker buyout program, it said.
The chipmaker, whose customers include Apple Inc. and Nintendo Co., said it expects to save 54 billion yen annually from the reduction.
The Kawasaki, Japan-based company said in July it would eliminate 5,000 jobs and obtained 97 billion yen in financial support from its major shareholders and banks last month as it seeks to be profitable for the first time since it was set up in 2010.
Renesas said it's reviewing the impact on its earnings forecasts.
A consortium of Japanese companies led by Toyota Motor Corp., with the backing of a state-run fund, plan a rescue of the company to counter a bid for the chipmaker by the U.S.-based private equity firm KKR, the Nikkei business daily reported last month.
The group wants to invest 100 billion yen ($1.3 billion) in Renesas to acquire a majority stake in the company before the end of the year, the Nikkei said, without providing further details on how it obtained the information.
The group, it said, included the government's Innovation Network Corp., Panasonic Corp., Nissan Motor Co., Honda Motor Co., Canon Inc., Fanuc Corp. and auto parts makers Denso Corp. and Keihin Corp. Denso is affiliated with Toyota.
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