Recently, office furniture giant Knoll said that due to the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on the company's business, as well as the challenges and uncertainties brought to the economy, the company will lay off 275 people to further reduce operating costs.
 
According to the company, once the layoffs are completed, it is expected to save approximately US $ 24 million annually.
 
This layoff is also Knoll's second layoff this year, mainly to control operating costs and improve the company's operating efficiency. In mid-January this year, the company announced that it would close its office building in Grand Rapids and sell the building by the second quarter as part of the company's integration plan, but it is estimated that the sale of the office building will affect the company's 180 hourly-paid jobs And 30 paid positions.
 
Knoll's chairman and CEO, Andrew Cogan, said that the current business environment forced the company to lay off employees, and the company should not be taken lightly about the impact and crisis caused by the epidemic.
 
Data show that the company's first quarter net sales were 340 million US dollars, an increase of 2.2% year-on-year. Net profit was US $ 10.9 million, a decrease of 39.4% from US $ 18 million in the same period last year. And Knoll's total sales in 2019 reached 1.43 billion US dollars.
 
In the last two weeks of the first quarter, Knoll announced the suspension of operations at its two plants in Italy and the DatesWeiser plant in Buffalo, New York, while its production base in Pennsylvania, USA, was suspended for some time. In addition, Knoll has suspended most of its showrooms in Europe, and many European dealers have also closed their operations in March.
 
The company said that if there is no impact of the shutdown caused by the epidemic, Knoll estimates that the value of shipments in the first quarter will be 12 million more than the actual situation.
Knoll expects that it will face greater challenges in the second quarter because of the impact of the epidemic and government orders: on the one hand, customers will have difficulties in receiving goods and installing equipment; on the other hand, Knoll will have to work in some factories It is also a big problem to match production capacity with order demand under the condition of shutdown.
 
The impact of the epidemic has caused an unbearable blow to the global home furnishing industry. Even a world-class home furnishing company like Knoll, which has a revenue of more than 10 billion yuan, can hardly survive weeks or even months of suffering. In order to protect the "morale" of enterprises, many companies do everything possible not to lay off staff, but obviously, even after taking various measures, it is unlikely to cover the losses caused by the epidemic, layoffs have often become the only option.