Adobe has announced it will be slashing 10% of its worldwide workforce after completing its US$3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia.
The company has also announced that its quarterly profits have jumped 38%.
Adobe chief executive Bruce Chizen told the Reuters news service that it would be cutting between 650 and 700 jobs.
The job losses will be spread across its global operations.The company first announced its intention to acquire Macromedia in April — a deal which will bring together the two major desktop formats used in creative content development — Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) and Macromedia’s Flash technology.
“There can certainly be no doubt that the resulting company, if allowed to go ahead, will make it very difficult for others to play and more importantly to acquire,” said Bola Rotibi, senior analyst at research house Ovum at the time.
“Ultimately, Adobe and Macr- omedia both have superb cross-platform technologies and if they can exploit the ubiquity of the PDF reader and Flash and really emphasise the any client, anywhere theme they will be in a formidable position to dictate the entire future direction of the industry,” she continued.
Rotibi added that the acquisition will allow Adobe to compete better with Microsoft in the emerging market for online application development — particularly against Vista, the next generation of Microsoft’s Windows operating system which supports graphics rich applications and is expected to have presentation capabilities similar to those of Adobe’s Acrobat and Flash software.
Announcing the completion of the acquisition, Chizen said the company hopes to develop a powerful software platform that would scale from mobile devices to high-end servers.
“The explosion of digital content combined with the accelerating proliferation of mobile phones, wireless devices and the growth of broadband are transforming the way the world engages with information,” he said.
“Adobe and Macromedia are at the centre of this trend, and together, we will build on our combined heritage to redefine the way people and businesses communicate,” he added.
New product bundles have already been announced as part of the initial integration — Creative Suite 2 and Adobe video tools, which include Macromedia Flash Professional 8 and Macromedia Studio 8 software.
John Boutros, general manager of Grapheast, distributor of Adobe products in the Middle East, said: “Historically Macromedia has not done much in the Middle East. But since the acquisition, we are already supplying Macromedia products, so the end user will already feel the benefits of this.”
Adobe is also expected to release Macromedia products with Arabic content. “We expect Adobe will localise Macromedia’s products and release them in Arabic. It’s common sense that they should do this, because they have developed other products in Arabic,” Boutros said.
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