Renesas Says May Cut More Jobs, But Restructuring Past Halfway

[Ron Burgundy]

By Sophie Knight and Reiji Murai TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese chipmaker Renesas Electronics may cut more jobs as it finishes a massive restructuring that is focusing its business on the automotive and industrial sectors and has pulled it back into the black after years of losses. Remaining steps will focus on selling factories and exiting businesses announced in a 2012 restructuring framework, updated a year ago, with about 40 percent of the plan still to be implemented, Renesas Chairman and CEO Hisao Sakuta told a media round table on Tuesday. "If there's a mismatch between what the company is trying to do and what an individual wants to do, people will probably be quitting." Renesas, hit hard when a March 2011 earthquake shut a key chip plant for months and sent customers looking for other suppliers, has already cut more than 10,000 jobs and racked up 350 billion yen ($3.3 billion) in cumulative net losses over the last four financial years. Last week, Renesas unveiled a chip using new technologies that it aims to eventually apply to autonomous driving, which merges together feeds from cameras fitted to the car to create a 3D image and can detect pedestrians within several meters of a vehicle.

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