Hitachi cuts 10 percent of U.S. work force

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is joining other disk drive maker in axing jobs. A company representative said on Wednesday that Hitachi is reducing its headcount in the United States by about 400, out of a total of roughly 4,000 U.S. employees. Hitachi plans to trim the jobs through a combination of a voluntary retirement incentive program and an "involuntary resource action" slated to take effect Dec. 13, the representative said.

The move comes as Hitachi works to integrate its hard disk drive business with that of IBM. "We are doing this in an extremely competitive industry that requires companies to have very aggressive cost structures," the company said. About 3,800 of Hitachi's U.S. employees work in San Jose, Calif. It has 24,000 employees overall. Hitachi rivals Seagate Technology and Maxtor also have announced job cuts this year. One analyst pinned trouble in the drive industry on overproduction.