Newsday: Canon USA lays off 100-plus employees at Melville headquarters

GaryPageau
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Canon U.S.A. Inc. recently laid off between 100 and 150 employees at its Melville, N.Y., headquarters, according to people familiar with the company and numerous media reports. According to Newsday, the job cuts represent between 9% and 14% of the Japanese company’s local workforce, which totaled 1,081 employees in December, based on Suffolk County documents.

The job cuts come about six months after Canon USA brought on new CEO. Isao “Sammy” Kobayashi, who over  from Kazuto Ogawa on Jan. 1 after serving as the President and CEO at Canon Canada Inc. for the previous year. Kobayashi has been at Canon since 1990. Kobayashi confirmed to Newsday “there were position eliminations” but declined to provide details, including the number of affected employees and the departments they worked in.

The Layoff.com has an extended thread outlining the layoffs and the impacts on employees and morale. Among those dismissed was Rudy Winston, a long-time media representative for the company; for many consumer tech writers, Winston was the face of the company. He was also featured on Canon’s YouTube channel.

The layoffs took place to “streamline operations and promote efficiency to achieve the necessary levels of performance that are required to meet our targets and remain competitive,” Kobayashi said in a statement in response to Newsday questions.

Canon Inc., the parent company in Tokyo, projected in April it would end the year with a profit of 305 billion yen, ($1.9 billion), a 15.3% increase from 2023. Sales were projected to climb 4%, year over year, to 4.35 trillion yen ($27.7 billion). But Canon also reported an 8.8% decline in camera sales in the January-March period compared with a year earlier. Sales were up, year over year, for photocopying machines, medical imaging equipment and other products.

In Melville, which serves as the company’s Americas headquarters, employees receiving pink slips will receive a severance package that includes salary, healthcare benefits and outplacement services, according to Kobayashi, in the Newsday article. The job cuts “will support the company’s ability to make decisions in a faster and more agile way … [Canon U.S.A.] operates in a competitive and fast-changing industry, so we must effectively adapt to our customer’s needs and the public’s ever-evolving relationship with advancing technology,” he said.