Idaho’s largest for-profit employer is laying off workers next year. What we know

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) — Micron plans to reduce its workforce by about 10% next year.

The Boise company, which makes memory chips used in digital devices, wrote in an SEC filing that the job cuts are the result of “challenging industry conditions.”

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a quarterly conference call with investors that the company is taking significant steps to reduce costs and operating expenses as demand for its principal products wanes. The 10% reduction in staff throughout 2023 will come via voluntary departures and layoffs, he said.

Mehrotra also said the company is slowing production, cutting executive salaries, halting share buybacks and suspending bonuses across the board.

No information about cuts in Boise was immediately available. A spokesperson for Micron told the Idaho Statesman by email on Tuesday that workforce reductions will vary by country. The company has chip manufacturing plants in Virginia, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, according to previous reporting by the Statesman.

The spokesperson also said about half of the anticipated workforce reductions will come from not filling job openings created by normal voluntary attrition over the next year. The remainder will stem from “targeted business decisions,” including the elimination of certain projects and associated roles, as well as individual performance.

Micron anticipates most of the job cuts will be completed by the end of February, subject to local legal requirements and processes, according to the spokesperson.

The company has roughly 49,000 employees worldwide as of Dec. 1, according to its quarterly earnings report filed with the SEC on Thursday, including more than 6,000 people in the Treasure Valley. Micron is the largest for-profit employer in Idaho.

The technology giant manufactures two kinds of memory, the first being dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM , a type of random-access memory most common in laptops and workstations; and the second being NAND (short for not-and), a type of flash memory used in phones, cameras and computers.

Mehrotra said there’s now an imbalance in the industry, with too much inventory and not enough demand, but he expects the profit outlook to improve in the long term.

“It is important to distinguish between the short term and the long term,” Micron said in a statement emailed to the Statesman. “Today, the industry is facing a supply-demand imbalance caused by worsening macroeconomic conditions, rapid changes in consumer and overall industry demand and customer inventory buildup. Our investments in leading-edge memory manufacturing are focused on supporting demand in the second half of the decade.”

In September, the company announced that it would invest $15 billion through 2030 to build a new fab, or plant, for memory manufacturing at its headquarters campus in Southeast Boise. A month later, Micron also revealed plans for a major expansion in New York state requiring $100 billion over the next two decades.

The “mega fab” planned for Clay, New York, will create nearly 50,000 jobs, including 9,000 high-paying jobs at Micron itself, the company predicted in a news release about the expansion. Micron has said its new fab in Boise will generate more than 17,000 jobs, including 2,000 at Micron. The staff reductions are not expected to affect those plans.

Both investments followed passage of the CHIPS and Science Act by Congress, which was signed by President Joe Biden in August. The legislation authorized subsidies for semiconductor companies to expand in the U.S.

Micron used to manufacture chips in Boise but stopped in 2009. The campus is now a research and development center.