Quiksilver Eliminates 200 Positions

josh hunter

• November 05 2009
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On November 5 Quiksilver completed a reorganization of its staff in the Americas region. In total 200 positions have been eliminated. The layoffs affected every organization under the Quiksilver America umbrella according to the company’s Vice President of Investor Relations Bruce Thomas.

“We’ve reported to investors over the past couple of quarters that we’d be making expense reductions of between 40–60 million dollars from a combination of SG&A improvements and cost cuts, as well as cost of goods sold improvements, or margin improvements,” Thomas explains. “In doing that we started down a path of redefining the structure of our Americas operation in particular because we had been arranged along an organization structure that had brand management silos. We had separate merchandising, design, sales, marketing, sourcing, and production teams by brand for each region. We’re breaking down some of those brand barriers and creating a structure that’s much more functionally based moving forward.

“You can imagine with this type of restructuring we’ve had to part ways across a broad spectrum of different levels of employees and managers,” Thomas continues.

Thomas says the total number of people affected by the cuts this week is 125, which has impacted the company’s distribution center in Mira Loma, DC’s offices in Vista, and Quiksilver’s global headquarters in Huntington Beach. In addition to the employees who have been laid off, there were an additional 75 positions eliminated.

“That can happen in one of a couple of ways,” Thomas says. “We either had job openings that will go unfilled, or there are positions that were collapsed because of the restructuring. So there were 200 positions eliminated in total affecting 125 employees this week.”

The company is not providing a breakdown of positions eliminated, but will report on new management appointments tomorrow, Thomas adds.”We’ll be more comfortable sharing those once the employees who are going to be impacted by the new management teams have been informed.”

Stay tuned to TransWorld Business for updates as they happen.