Dot-com job cuts set record

After two consecutive months of declining dot-com job cuts, April surged 84 percent over March to a record 17,554 jobs lost, according to figures released today by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts daily. April dot-com job cuts zoomed past the March total of 9,533, the lowest figure since last November.

By comparison, there were only 327 dot-com cuts announced in April, 2000.

April of this year was 37 percent higher than the previous record set in January when 12,828 job cuts were announced by companies in the Internet sector.

In the first four months of 2001, 51,564 dot-com cuts have been recorded, more than any other four-month period since Challenger began tracking them in December, 1999.

While Internet technology companies led April job cuts with 6,059, firms offering online financial services experienced the sharpest increase in job cuts, from 302 in March to 2,341 in April.

"We are seeing a telling shift in the types of companies that are announcing job cuts," says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "In the beginning of the downturn, it was primarily the companies which conducted business solely over the Internet that were having the most trouble. Traditional brick-and-mortar companies expanding on to the Internet seemed better able to survive, or even grow, since the majority of their business, still conducted via old economy channels, provided a stable financial base.

"We now see more and more of these Old Economy-New Economy hybrids cutting their online staffs. Companies that were hoping, if not expecting, to eventually shift the lion1s share of their business to the Internet may be forced to consider entirely new strategies for both short term and long term," he says.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 26, 2001