Cisco could cut up to 10,000 staff in August cull

Cisco is considering cutting around 14 per cent of its workforce as the networking vendor struggles to turn its fortunes around and grow profits.

Around 10,000 jobs could be cut in total, as many as 7,000 going by the end of August, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday citing two unnamed sources.

Another report on Monday by Gleacher & Co analyst Brian Marshall suggested that Cisco needs to cut at least 5,000 jobs, or seven per cent of its workforce, by the end of next month.

Cisco refused to comment on the news, but did refer back to its third-quarter earnings call in May, when it announced that expenses would be cut by $1bn between the fourth quarter of this year and the end of 2012.

The company said at the time that reductions would be made in employees and contractors, but gave no details on how deep the cuts would go.

Chief executive John Chambers also said on the call that switches and the public sector are the two areas posing the most problems for Cisco.

The firm's third-quarter report showed that profit had declined year on year by nearly 18 per cent to $1.8bn.

Chambers sent a memo to employees in April about his plan to boost Cisco and fix its portfolio "with surgical precision".

He also spoke to analysts about how Cisco plans to focus on five areas: cloud computing, business collaboration tools, network routing and switching, computer system architecture and video communication.

Chambers was silent on the future of Cisco's consumer products, but the company has since shut down its Flip video camera business.