“NEC Corp said Thursday it will slash 10,000 jobs, almost one in 10 of its workers, in a bid to cut costs as competition from foreign rivals including Apple Inc pushes it deep into the red,” Nobuhiro Kubo reports for Reuters.

“NEC blamed its poor performance on weak demand for its smartphones amid the popularity of Apple’s iPhone in Japan, as well as on inroads by foreign rivals into the domestic IT infrastructure business and difficulty in expanding overseas,” Moyer reports. “It warned it would post a net loss of 100 billion yen ($1.3 billion) for the year to March 31, much bigger than its previous forecast of a 15 billion yen profit and a similar average estimate from eight analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.”

Moyer reports, “It also slashed its projection for annual mobile phone sales by nearly a quarter to 5 million phones and most of the job cuts will be in its mobile phone business. Headcount will be reduced by the end of September and around 7,000 layoffs will be in Japan, Nobuhiro Endo said at a news conference in Tokyo.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Here’s who is to blame for NEC’s woes: NEC. Not Apple. And, if you can cut 1 in 10 workers, and still stay in business, then you have far too many employees in the first place.

Good luck to those displaced workers. May they next work for a competent company that’s capable of competing.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Fred Mertz" for the heads up.]