With so much in the news about job cuts and closures of well-known dot com companies, we at SearchtheWeb.com thought we would track these companies and Internet related sites and provide you with updated short news announcements on their status.

Dot Com News from Week of June 10, 2002

6/12/02 H-P may eliminate about 10% of the jobs at its Asia-Pacific operations, matching the company's targeted percentage of job cuts world-wide, a company spokesperson said. 6/11/02 Corning said its Corning Cable Systems unit plans to eliminate more than 600 jobs, mainly through a restructuring of its optical-assembly plant in Hickory, N.C. 6/11/02 Celera Genomics Group, slashing one in seven jobs, is undertaking a restructuring that will emphasize drug discovery over its better known business of selling genetic information online. 6/11/02 NewPower Holdings Inc., which was launched by Enron Corp. in an ill-fated bid to revolutionize the retail energy business, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, based in Purchase, N.Y., said it faced a liquidity crunch and "the substantial risk of not being able to continue to operate as an independent entity." 6/7/02 Telus Corp. is expected to implement a massive restructuring that could see its workforce reduced by more than 10% in the wake of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's controversial price-cap decision last week. 6/5/02 WorldCom Inc. said it plans to get out of the wireless business, and people familiar with the phone company said it also plans to cut the work force by as much as 20%, or about 16,000 jobs, and trim another $1 billion in capital spending. 6/5/02 Alcatel plans to cut the work force at its optical-network components unit, Alcatel Optronics, by 25% by year end as it adapts to the continuing deterioration in market conditions. 6/5/02 The Swedish unit of Dutch telecoms operator KPNQwest has followed its parent company into bankruptcy but its operations would continue and had already been bid for. KPNQwest's Finnish business told Reuters last week it would try to go independent. The Portuguese unit said on Monday it would not be affected by the bankruptcy and services would continue, but the Belgian unit has filed for bankruptcy. 6/4/02 Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said that the company will deliver 15,000 job cuts in two installments: two-thirds by Nov. 1 and the remaining one-third in fiscal 2003. 6/4/02 Corning Inc. began implementing a major portion of the restructuring plans it announced in April with a series of work force reductions in its telecommunications segment and in several research and development facilities. In a press release Tuesday, the fiber-optic maker said it expects to eliminate about 1,500 jobs and offer early retirement packages to about 600 employees by the end of the week. 6/4/02 IBM Corp. said it will lay off 1,500 of the 20,000 employees in its semiconductor business. The layoffs, which were fewer than had been rumored, had been widely expected as the business has been losing money in the world-wide semiconductor slowdown. An IBM spokesman said about 950 of the layoffs will be at its Burlington, Vt., semiconductor plant with 200 in Fishkill, N.Y., and 100 in Endicott, N.Y. The remainder are at other facilities in the U.S. 6/4/02 Velocita filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection, the latest in a long string of filings to hit the [telecom] industry. Velocita got its start as a construction company, laying fiber-optic cable for other telecom companies. The company has scaled back its work force to 54 employees from 275. 6/3/02 StarBand Communications Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday after running out of cash because it has not been able to bill its customers for service, the satellite-Internet company said in its filing. StarBand, which is privately owned and based in McLean, VA, listed $229 million in liabilities. It is jointly owned by Gilat Satellite Networks Ltd., EchoStar Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. StarBand said it was forced to file for reorganization because EchoStar is withholding StarBand's customer records, even though the marketing agreement between the two companies ended in February. Since then, StarBand has been unable to collect revenue from about 31,000 of its 41,000 customers, according to the filing. 6/3/02 Napster Inc., the Internet music-swapping service that has been entangled in copyright lawsuits with five record companies since 1999, filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. The move was expected. Napster has agreed to sell its assets to Germany's Bertelsmann AG for $8 million in cash and the assumption of certain liabilities. 6/3/02 Metrocall, Inc. announced today that the Company and most of its subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for reorganization under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code today in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. Metrocall continues to operate its nationwide business operations and expects to continue to provide all paging and wireless messaging services without interruption or disruption during its reorganization process.

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