NI (National Instruments) new logo.

NI announces a reduction in its workforce

  • According to an article published in the Austin Business Journal, NI (formerly National Instruments) announced at the end of October its intention to reduce its workforce by 9%, or approximately 650 employees of the company’s 7,200 employees worldwide.

 
This decision is due in part to the coronavirus pandemic that has impacted economic activity around the world. Revenues for the Texas-based Austin-based company recorded successive declines in the first three quarters of its 2020 fiscal year compared to the same periods in 2019.

Year-to-date revenues for the first three quarters of 2020 were down 7% year-over-year to $919 million.

The Austin Business Journal says that in a letter to NI staff, Eric Starkloff, the company’s CEO since February 1, 2020, called the decision “hard and necessary. Employees who will lose their jobs were to be notified by November 6, with the exception of those working in countries that require compliance with local legal requirements. The hundreds of people who will be laid off will be compensated until the end of the year.

National Instruments, a specialist in modular instrumentation, was founded in 1976 in Austin. Its flagship product is the LabView graphical programming software. Its main invention: PXI, a modular instrumentation standard that is now widely used in automatic test systems. Last June, the Texas company officially changed its name to NI, in order to place greater emphasis on its role as a software supplier and no longer solely on its original know-how as an instrument designer.