Tellabs cutting 530 jobs

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Updated: January 31, 2012 12:18PM

Tellabs is cutting 530 jobs in a companywide restructuring, citing “a climate of economic uncertainty” for the Naperville-based telecommunications equipment maker.

The cuts represent 16 percent of Tellab’s total workforce of 3,250.

Some employees will be let go at a Naperville research and development center, but spokesman George Stenitzer could not give an exact number. Tellabs employs 900 people at the center and its headquarters.

The company will close four of its nine research and development centers. The centers to be shuttered are in Petaluma, Calif.; Vancouver, Canada; Bangalore, India; and Karachi, Pakistan.

A worker notification law in California requires that layoffs be publicized. The number of employees affected at the Petaluma site totals 43, and a research and development center in Santa Clara, Calif. is being reduced by 203, though no total workforce number was available for that site.

Tellabs reported Tuesday a 20 percent drop in revenue for the second straight quarter amid increased competition and lower purchases from AT&T. It is downsizing to concentrate on its two most successful businesses— stringing cellphone towers back to the telecom network and providing electronics that connect municipalities’ fiber-optics networks. The company will continue to support its WiMax technology customers, including Clearwire, but will not transfer them to a different form of 4G high-speed technology known as LTE, Stenitzer said.

Work also will stop on the Tellabs SmartCore 9100 LTE product, a platform for the mobile web.

The layoffs come on top of a 125-employee cutback that Tellabs announced in July. But the company continues to hire in growth and essential-skills areas, so it will hire 105 new employees within the next year, Stenitzer said.