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Aug. 21, 2007

On Friday, Fast Search & Transfer reduced its employee count by 148 employees with a company-wide layoff, according to AftenPost/E24.

Overall, the company had hired about 400 new employees between last year and Q1 2007.

According to the company, there is a good dialog between employer and employees, and the ones that have to go will be fully compensated.

The turnover for this year is estimated to be about $160 million, compared to 162.6 million last year. But the company says it is prepared for a 30 percent growth in 2008.

The problems started late last year, when financial director Joseph Larson discovered unexpected losses of $11 million.

However, that wasn't the end of the story, and more bad news soon came rolling in. CEO John Markus Lervik now admits that the company has been "too much technology" and sales-driven, and that was one of its biggest handicaps.

Fast Search & Transfer is now facing new life as compared to the past two to three years. Dagens Naringsliv reports that the company saw its fourth year in a row with over 50 percent growth last year alone.

The company is to save $47 million this year, according to E24 Fast. It will also leave some specific business areas and focus on more of its core activities, such as business enterprise search.

Some have argued that Fast should find itself a strong international partner. Lervik does not want to see the company acquired by a competitor. “The search engine market has to be consolidated,” he says. “but we would like to be in a position where it is we who ‘consolidates’, instead of being ‘consolidated’.

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Source: Pandia