Lenovo, one of the largest tech employers in North Carolina's Research Triangle, confirmed Monday that companywide job cuts will affect its local workforce.
Postings on the online message board TheLayoff.com suggest job cuts at Lenovo began late last week. The PC computer maker declined to say how many positions will be eliminated.
Based in Hong Kong, Lenovo has had its North American headquarters in Morrisville since 2006. As of October, the company had employed roughly 5,100 people in the United States, with its largest employee base in North Carolina. Citing company policy, Lenovo spokespeople declined to share the exact number of workers in the Triangle.
“Like all business, we regularly review our cost structure to align with external market dynamics and we are currently rebalancing some resources towards our growth engines to further drive the transformation of Lenovo’s business,” said Lisa Marie Ferrell, a spokesperson for Lenovo North America, in an email to The News & Observer.
This isn’t the first time layoffs have hit Lenovo’s Triangle operations in recent years. In 2019, the company cut 500 positions overall. In 2017, it laid off 300 employees in Research Triangle Park, and two years before that, it had eliminated 230 local positions.
According to a 2019 report from Wake County Economic Development, the company had employed 3,000 people in the county, while data from the North Carolina Department of Commerce ranked the company as a top 25 employer in Wake this year.
Lenovo has not filed a WARN Notice with the state, a required step if a major company plans to lay off at least 500 employees.
This year, companies have filed 42 WARN notices in North Carolina for a total of 4,204 eliminated positions. Other layoffs aren’t included in this total, including those made by the Durham-based Avaya in September.
Cisco, which like Lenovo employs several thousand people in RTP, announced last month it would cut around 5% of its total workforce, or approximately 4,000 positions, due to internal restructuring.
While the company has declined to specify whether the broader cuts would impact its Triangle staff, comments Monday on multiple online forums, including TheLayoff.com, indicated the layoffs have begun to affect RTP employees.
