Itron cuts 40 more positions

Reduced orders by customers and a corporate restructuring have cost about 40 Itron workers their jobs, the company announced Friday.

Of the 40 laid off this week, 30 are in Spokane with the rest elsewhere, said Itron Vice President of Investor Relations Mima Scarpelli.

Most of the 40 jobs being cut are in software services, one of Itron’s two new organizational units. The other unit is hardware, which include assorted automated meter reading units used by electric, gas and water utilities

The 30 jobs being cut in Spokane include five management positions, according to Scarpelli.

Spokane’s Itron corporate office has about 470 workers and roughly 700 outside Spokane. That number doesn’t include another 800 workers joining Itron’s payroll through the acquisition of the electronic metering unit of Schlumberger Ltd., which was completed earlier this month.

This is the second Itron layoff of 2004. In February, it laid off 72 workers, with roughly half of those losses occurring in Spokane, the company said.

Scarpelli said the cuts, in part, are tied to “matching expenses with expected business levels for the software side of our business. Customers are just not spending as much in certain areas as we expected.”

Over the past three years, Itron has added a number of companies providing software tools and services aimed at making utilities and transmission operators more efficient. As it reorganized itself into hardware and software units, Itron has also seen orders for its software services fall short of expectations, said Scarpelli.

For the second quarter, Itron reported net income of $818,000, or 4 cents per share, down from $4.2 million, or 19 cents per share, in the second quarter of 2003. Revenues for the second quarter of 2004 were $79.6 million, down from $80.2 million in the second quarter of 2003.

In its latest quarterly earnings report, company officials said earnings have been hurt by “unusual non-operating expenses,” including a $1.3 million interest expense associated with debt financing for the acquisition of Schlumberger.

Earnings were also shaved due to a $800,000 write-off of the company’s investment in Lanthorn Technologies, a Boston firm that shut down this year, Itron officials said in the last earnings report.