Philips NV, which last month cut 4,000 jobs in its semiconductor operations, yesterday let the other shoe drop with the axing of a swingeing 4,900 of the 15,000 jobs in its information systems division, most of them in Europe. The company is phasing out the development, manufacturing and sale of its own computers apart from personal computers and the job cuts will be split evenly between manufacturing and sales. The company is to buy in all servers and multi-user computers from Motorola Inc and Intel Corp, and says that it acknowledges the need to put its own house in order before it can look for a partner for its computer business. By concentrating on extremely open hardware and software, it will be able to provide any partner with marketing channels for that company’s products across Europe.
