Sega Electronics Ltd has announced plans to cut its worldwide workforce by a quarter over the next 12 months. The 1,000 job losses will be part of a massive rationalization program for the Japanese consumer electronics company which will also see it stopping investments in overseas amusement arcades.
The launch of the firm’s new Dreamcast console in Japan late last year has not been as successful as expected. The firm had early problems with getting yields on the VideoLogic graphics chip for the console (CI No 3,548) and despite optimistic early reports about the sales of Dreamcast, it has now slipped to third place in Japan behind Sony’s Playstation and Nintendo N64. Sega has predicted that it will make a loss of $378m for financial year 1998 due largely to write-offs from its overseas amusement operations and domestic inventories of its previous, unsuccessful console, the Sega Saturn.
