[Updated: 10:45 PDT] Lineo provided the following statement in response to inquiries from LinuxDevices.com regarding rumors about a recent layoff . . .

On Friday, July 13, 2001, Lineo conducted a layoff that affected 13 percent of our worldwide staff, or 42 people. This layoff was primarily conducted to bring sales and revenue in line with expenses and to get Lineo closer to its goal of profitability. The reduction brings Lineo's total worldwide staff to 280 people.

Lineo finished its most successful quarter ever on June 30. Lineo's sales were in line with expectations and were large enough to make Lineo the second largest Linux software company, and the largest embedded Linux
software company, in the world. In the last quarter Lineo announced deals with Sharp Electronics and Motorola, joined the TV Linux Alliance, began
shipping Lineo Embedix SDK 2.0 and announced our support of 93 processors and 52 boards.

Lineo is well positioned to continue its leadership in the embedded software market and succeed in helping customers adopt open standards and open source software in their embedded projects.

According to Lineo spokesperson Lyle Ball, “Lineo is starting out the current quarter with greater than five times the contracted pipeline (backlog) as there was at the beginning of the last quarter.” The layoff was due to the fact that Lineo “had hired based on higher growth projections, prior to the market downturn,” he added.

During the past two and a half years, Lineo grew from 12 to nearly 325 employees primarily through a series of acquisitions. These included: Zentropix (US), RT-Control (Canada), Moreton Bay (Australia), USE (Japan), INUP (France), FirePlug (Canada), and Embedded Power (US). The company has in the past reorganized its staffing as a result of the many acquisitions, due to redundancies in some areas and needs in others, but has not had a previous company-wide reduction in headcount, according to Ball.

Many Linux and Embedded Linux software companies have had staff reductions this year, due to the economic downturn. For example, MontaVista Software reduced its workforce by approximately 20 percent within the last several months.

 
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