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Disc drive leader A leading maker of computer disk drives, Seagate's first product was completed in 1980 - a 5.25-inch hard disk drive for the burgeoning PC market. They quickly grabbed half of the small disk drive market in the early 1980s. However, Seagate's profits soon fell as IBM's market share decreased. To cut costs, Seagate moved its manufacturing facilities to Singapore and began to integrate its production process. By 1986, Seagate had finished its first round of acquisitions and revenues were once again rising. Seagate nearly missed the market for 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, but the company caught on in time to cash in on the now-dominant technology. In 1989, Seagate purchased an important rival, Control Data, doubling its size. Through continued acquisitions, Seagate became a leading maker of disk and tape drives, storage systems, and software. Rough road to restructuring An industry slump in 1997, along with growing competition and falling prices in low-end disk drives, led to the ouster of chief executive Alan Shugart, who had founded the company in 1979. Shugart's successor, Stephen Luczo moved in August 1998 to consolidate the company's disk-drive and related operations with a management restructuring. By January 2000, these restructuring activities had resulted in a 40 percent increase in output per employee. Luzco's methods for improving productivity included the deployment of 370 "black belts" who, after having undergone a trianing course, sought out and monitored programs designed to improve quality and cut costs. Going private In early 2000, Seagate announced that it had struck a $20 billion deal with Veritas Software. The relationship between the two companies stemmed from an October 1998 agreement by Seagate to sell some of its businesses to Veritas Software in a $1.5 billion transactions - at the time the second-largest acquisition of a software company. Under terms of the new deal, Seagate is to divest itself of its ownership of Veritas and be acquired by a newly-formed investor group. Seagate also formed a joint venture in July 2000 with Thomson Multimedia to make high-capacity digital-storage systems for home consumer electronics. The consumer division of Seagate became part of the new independent company called CacheVision. Stick to what you do best Following the global trend in the electronics industry to outsource non-essential functions, Seagate announced it was closing more manufacturing plants in 2000, including most of its motor, printed circuit cables, and coil businesses. The company wants to push into new storage device-based consumer markets, including drives for products that record TV shows and surf the Internet. Luczo anticipates that the adoption of local storage devices in television will create a huge opportunity for expansion in the coming five years. He predicts that Seagate's profitability will give it the research and development edge it will need to enter these new markets.
Seagate's employment web page, located at the company's web site at www.seagate.com, enables applicants to search through a list of current openings by department, title, or location. Applicants can also post resumes to Seagate through this Web page. Resumes must reference specific job openings by using the job code that Seagate provides on the Web page.
Seagate's American operations are divided into technical and corporate divisions. Technical employees emphasize Seagate's "top-of-the-line" technological resources and praise the "interactive" environment. Recent hires in technical divisions say that their "senior colleagues are generous with their time" and that they can be "flexible" in arranging their own. "If I need to take few hours for personal business, I just take it," says one employee. Corporate employees say "the company has an entrepreneurial attitude" that "empowers" them to "take on more responsibility more quickly than we would at other companies." All of Seagate's employees, meanwhile, benefit from the "impressive" profit sharing plan that is a "key component" of the compensation for their "difficult" and "demanding" assignments.
Human Resources
Disc drives;Software;Capital equipment-head wafer fabrication;GMR disc heads;Information management software;Tape drives
IBM;NEC;Toshiba;Western Digital More Company Profiles For more career information, go to Vault.com ©2000, Vault.com Inc
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