LINDON — Linux imbedded systems company Lineo Inc. has laid off 40 employees, including 25 in Utah, as it suffers from a difficult technology market.
Company spokesman Lyle Ball said jobs were cut across the board and throughout the private company's offices in 11 countries.
The move leaves Lineo with about 280 employees, including 100 in Utah. A few weeks ago, it had more than 320 workers, 125 in the Beehive State.
"We had ramped up with expectations to what the quarter would be, but with the slight downtown in the market in the quarter, we needed to realign with the market," Ball said.
While not revealing figures, Ball said Lineo had its best financial quarter ever, but it fell short of company projections.
"It was an incredible quarter for us, but as great a quarter as it was with our sales, we still felt the need to realign the head count for a short period of time. The industry was an anomaly this quarter, and few technology companies were able to anticipate what happened," he said. "We expect rapid growth and hope to entice them to rejoin us or have others in the valley rejoin us as soon as we have sufficient revenues to sustain a larger business."
Lineo's embedded systems products allow original equipment manufacturers to make devices and systems that interact with the Internet. Among the products with the technology are digital televisions, DVD players, personal video recorders and set-top and cable boxes; Internet infrastructure such as routers, modems, switches, gateways and network-attached storage; and handheld devices such as personal digital assistants, mobile phones, entertainment systems and scanners.
During the most recent quarter, Lineo announced deals with Sharp Electronics and Motorola, joined the TV Linux Alliance, and began shipping Lineo Embedix Software Development Kit 2.0, a product designed to developers to more easily configure, customize and deploy Linux-based embedded software solutions for end-use products.