Will Cisco's 5,500 job cuts affect India business?

Cisco, among other top technology companies, has announced a job cut of 5,500 employees comprising 7 percent of its global workforce.

It is unclear yet if the lay-offs will impact Cisco India, the company's largest non-US division, with around 11,000 employees, which constitute 15 percent of its 70,000 global workforce.

The company's Indian business saw a spurt in growth for eight consecutive quarters with the 2016 first quarter posting the highest growth at 40 percent.

Cisco India, like Infosys, has also seen steady erosion of four top executives in six weeks, with August alone witnessing three of them stepping down. Purushottam Kaushik, managing director of sales for India and SAARC region; along with Joydeep Bose, MD of Asia Pacific and Japan regions and Lalit S. Chowdhary, director of systems engineering for Service Provider in India and SAARC, resigned from the firm in August this year. In July, Jaswant Boyat, Technical Director of the Systems Provider division left the IT firm.

The company said the lay-offs are part of its business shifting from its hardware-centred expertise to tap the software, including the cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) markets.

"Today's market requires Cisco and our customers to be decisive, move with greater speed and drive more innovation than we've seen in our history," the firm told UK's Guardian daily. "Today, we announced a restructuring enabling us to optimize our cost base in lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data centre and cloud."

The job losses are expected to cost the company $700 million in termination pay in early 2017.

The networking giant has been announcing job cuts since 2011, when the company sacked 6,500 employees worldwide, the highest till date. In 2012, Cisco fired 1,300 employees, while the number has progressively increased for 2013 and 2014. In 2013, the IT equipment manufacturer said goodbye to 4,000 employees, while it cut 6,000 jobs in 2014.

Other IT giants such as Intel, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard have also announced plans for massive lay-offs by the end of the 2016 fiscal.