Today: Symantec confirms plans to reduce its workforce by about 2,000 employees as it splits its business in half. Also: Tesla gains after earnings report.

The Lead: Symantec plans layoffs in conjunction with split

Symantec plans to chop roughly 2,000 jobs as part of a corporate divorce that will split the Mountain View security software company in half.

A spokeswoman for the company confirmed Thursday that layoffs and departures surrounding Symantec’s split would result in a 10 percent reduction, after executives mentioned the plans in a conference call Wednesday afternoon. Symantec declined to estimate how many of the jobs lost will be in Silicon Valley or detail specific departments that will be targeted.

“This restructuring effort will take place across a number of locations and functions within the company over the next year,” Kristen Batch said in an email. “It will impact 10 percent of our global workforce and is part of the separation process that is currently underway.”

Symantec had more than 20,800 employees as of March, according to its most recent annual report, with 44 percent of them residing in the United States; Symantec had the 10th largest workforce among Silicon Valley tech companies in 2013.

Symantec announced last month that it will split the company in two, creating separate security and data-storage companies. The move effectively unravels the $13.5 billion acquisition of storage company Veritas in 2004, which many observers felt hampered the company’s ability to make fast moves in a rapidly changing security market.

“As management takes steps toward ‘right sizing’ the Symantec ship for the expected breakup, we believe the greater focus on each of Symantec’s core businesses will be beneficial over the long term,” FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives wrote in a note Thursday morning, in which he called the Veritas acquisition “counterproductive.”

“It seems like new CEO Michael Brown has finally taken off the rose-colored glasses and taken the needed medicine, a step in the right direction,” Ives said in an email discussion of Symantec’s layoffs with The Mercury News.

Symantec is the fourth member of Silicon Valley’s top 10 tech employers to plan major layoffs this year. The region’s second-largest tech company and largest employer, Hewlett-Packard, said in May that it was adding at least 11,000 layoffs to a wave of reductions that had already claimed 34,000 workers. Additionally, HP announced its own corporate split just ahead of Symantec, and added another 5,000 layoffs to its plans, pushing the total number of reductions past 50,000.

Intel, the third-largest employer among public tech companies in Silicon Valley, said in January that it planned to cut 5,000 jobs this year; and Cisco, the No. 5 employer, announced 6,000 job cuts in August, the fourth consecutive summer the San Jose networking giant has disclosed plans for thousands of layoffs. In addition, the ninth-largest employer, outsourcing company iGate, moved to New Jersey in 2014, and No. 11 Agilent Technologies split its company and moved thousands of jobs to the new North Bay headquarters of spinoff Keysight Technologies.

Symantec stock dropped 0.4 percent to $25.07 Thursday after releasing quarterly financial results Wednesday afternoon that projected profits and sales for the current quarter that were below analysts’ expectations.

SV150 market report: Tesla gains after earnings report

Wall Street indexes again reached record highs Thursday as Tesla Motors roared higher after detailing its financial performance for the third quarter.

Tesla beat analysts’ expectations with its quarterly report, but also brought down its full-year forecast for Model S deliveries and pushed off the launch of its next auto, the Model X, until later in 2015. Analysts were not concerned about the latter two moves, however, describing them as temporary production blips that do not matter as much as the continuing demand for the Palo Alto company’s electric cars. “I think there’s really some room for Tesla to pull demand levers to generate sales and we’ll get to see what the company can really do, now that capacity won’t be a long-term issue,” Dougherty analyst Andrea James wrote. Tesla shares added 4.4 percent to $241.22 on the day.

Apple gained 0.3 percent to $108.70 while fighting malware exposed by Palo Alto Networks, and a law firm is considering suing retail chains that cut off access to Apple Pay and other mobile payment solutions. Facebook began collecting donations to help with Ebola, which will add to the $25 million CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally gave to the effort, and shares in the Menlo Park social network gained 0.6 percent to $75.26. Rival Twitter gained 1.2 percent to $40.84 on the anniversary of its 2013 initial public offering. Zynga released its earnings report Thursday afternoon, and the San Francisco social-gaming company beat expectations, sending its share price higher than $2.50 after it closed with a 0.4 percent gain at $2.36. Nvidia also gained after announcing better-than-expected earnings, adding about 2 percent after closing with a 0.5 percent gain at $20.22.

Up: Tesla, GoPro, Palo Alto Networks, LinkedIn, Workday, Yelp, Salesforce, Oracle

Down: SolarCity, Pandora, AMD, SunPower

The SV150 index of Silicon Valley’s largest tech companies: Up 4.54, or 0.28 percent, to 1,631.42

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Up 17.75, or 0.38 percent, to 4,638.47

The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 69.94, or 0.4 percent, to 17,554.47

And the widely watched Standard & Poor’s 500 index: Up 7.64, or 0.38 percent, to 2,031.21

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