Grass Valley, officially for sale since last year, will lose 625 jobs or 25 percent of its entire workforce. The troubled company will also be reorganized.
Technicolor, Grass Valley’s French owner (formerly known as Thomson), announced the layoffs last week in an attempt to bring Grass Valley’s business back to the break-even point. It will reorganize the company into three segments: broadcast, headends and transmission.
Grass Valley manufacturers cameras, routers, switchers, servers, editors, transmission and compression equipment. Technicolor said the moves were taken in reaction to “a strongly deteriorated business climate” in which Grass Valley’s revenues fell 31 percent between 2008 and 2009. Losses totaled $109.5 million.
Technicolor switched its business focus last year, announcing it would concentrate on services for content creators and distributors through its film-processing and network origination services and digital set-top products. At the time, it deemed Grass Valley a “non core” business and put the company up for sale. Despite rumors of a sale that’s nearly completed for months, none has been officially announced to date.
