Weighed down by heavy restructuring charges, Seagate reported a loss of $81 million, or 16 cents a share, compared to net income in the same quarter last year of $160 million, or 32 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected, on average, a loss of 10 cents per share, excluding special items.

Ugly. And it gets worse. For the year, Seagate said it lost a horrifying $3.09 billion, or $6.32 per share.

But the situation is improving–at least, Seagate hopes so. Looking ahead, the company sees revenue of $2.4 billion to $2.6 billion in the current quarter, better than it had predicted in June. “We are…seeing signs that the storage markets are improving,” Seagate CEO Steve Luczo said in a statement. Later, during a conference later, he added, “We are approaching the September quarter cautiously.”

Sacked.

A quick scan of the carnage.

• 8,000 whacked at Sprint (S)
• 6,000 let go at Royal Philips (PHG)
• 1,100 sacked at AMD (AMD)
• 4,000 adjusting to new economic realities at Motorola (MOT)
• 3,000 laid off at Seagate (STX)
• And a few hundred at Oracle (ORCL), as well
• 1,900 declared redundant at Dell (DELL)
• 5,000 losing their jobs at Microsoft (MSFT)
• 1,000 managers and 5,000 contractors pink-slipped at Alcatel-Lucent (ALU)
• 1,500 gone at Yahoo (YHOO)
• 12,000 released into the wild at AT&T (T)
• 600 cut loose at Adobe (ADBE)
• 6,000 aligned with the global economic climate at Sun (JAVA)
• And at Nortel (NT) 1,300 positions cut on top of the 1,200 previously announced

Grim isn’t it? Sad thing is, this is just a simple snapshot of what’s been happening in tech. According to the Department of Labor, employers in the states shed 524,000 workers in December, 2.6 million in all of 2008. That makes the last year the worst for layoffs since 1945, when 2.75 million jobs were lost. And that’s frightening, because according to some experts, we’ll get no respite in 2009. “We are very early in the cycle,” Peter Morici, a professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland told BusinessWeek, adding that we’ve so far only seen a sliver of the job losses to come. “We are going to see the fury of the Old Testament for what we have done to the economy.”

A surprising turn of events. Because as recently as Friday, it seemed very much business as usual for Watkins, who had the uniquely unpleasant task of announcing a forthcoming round of layoffs while at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. “We are going to announce another round, and we think we’ll do it in January,” he told Bloomberg on Jan. 9. “There will be restructuring, and there will be some layoffs.”

And, indeed, it appears there have been. Not only has there been an abrupt change in leadership, but according to a new filing with the SEC, Seagate plans to sack about 10 percent of its U.S. workforce as part of a restructuring plan that “will impact a broad range of departments, including research and development.” It is, of course, “being done in response to the current economic environment.”

Our industry is the one that this going to get the economy through this recession.

– Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association

The International Consumer Electronics Show will kick off next week shrouded in a nimbus of recessionary gloom. Show attendance is expected to be down eight percent this year, according to Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, who expects 130,000 attendees to flood the convention–11,000 fewer than last year. The show floor itself will be slightly diminished as well. CES exhibitor booths required 1.8 million square feet in 2008. In 2009, they’ll take up 1.7 million, presumably thanks to the absence of Seagate (STX), Logitech (LOGI), Cisco (CSCO), Philips (PHG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Sanyo–all of which have abandoned plans to exhibit on the show floor. That said, the overall number of exhibitors will remain the same as last year, at about 2,700.

So the show will be a bit smaller and a bit less clamorous than in years past. Likely a bit more sober as well, given this rough retail year. Quite a change from the extravagance of years past, but not without a certain upside. “This is the bleakest CES in 30 years going in,” said Envisioneering Group analyst Richard Doherty. “[Some exhibitors] will be spending more of their time off the show floor. We may now be able to get between the Venetian and the convention in less than an hour.”

Not Seagate (STX).

Not Logitech (LOGI).

Not Cisco (CSCO).

Not Philips.

Not Yahoo. Obviously.

And not Sanyo, either.

All six companies have abandoned plans to exhibit on the Consumer Electronics Show floor. Like Belkin, they are all opting for the more intimate and inexpensive floorspace of a Vegas hotel room. Said Seagate spokesperson Woody Monroy, “We haven’t pulled out of CES…we’re just taking a different approach.” Cisco offered this statement on the matter:

On our Q1 FY ‘09 earnings call on November 5 we announced that we will be reducing expenses for FY09 by over $1B from our annualized expense run rate, given the challenging macroeconomic environment. We are targeting reductions in travel and discretionary-related expenses, including offsite meetings, outside services, equipment, events, trade shows, prototypes, marketing and other activities. Given this focus on reducing costs, we are modifying our participation in the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2009.

We have several speakers presenting in the various CES sessions, and Cisco chairman and CEO John Chambers will be delivering a keynote at the conference, as well. We are focusing our CES presence on our direct customers, press and analysts in order to create a more intimate event and reduce expenses. We look forward to an exciting CES 2009 with multiple product announcements that will reinforce Cisco’s consumer strategy. We remain committed to the consumer market, and we believe our cost control focus at this time is appropriate. In support of our CES presence, we will be utilizing Cisco’s world-class Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, such as TelePresence and WebEx, to maintain essential customer and partner communication. Cisco will have compelling demonstration areas and meeting rooms in the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas as we have for the past several years.”

Yesterday, Seagate (STX) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. (STEC), an early SSD maker, of patent infringement. In the suit, Seagate argues that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering the ways those products communicate with a computer. The company requested an injunction and unspecified damages, which it asks be tripled if STEC is found guilty of willful infringement.

“The public perception has been that solid-state will take over the world and run disk makers out of business, but you can’t bring that product to market without licensing disk-drive technology,” said Seagate CEO Bill Watkins. “STEC infringes on a number of Seagate’s patents which are important to the entire industry. We thought they would have to learn how to do storage differently to avoid our patents, but they decided to go ahead and violate them. … We have spent $7 billion over the last 10 years to optimize how our disks work. This is the first lawsuit brought by a hard-disk company against a solid-state company. We are protecting the entire industry.”

That’s an altruistic way of looking at litigation that Watkins suggested in an interview in March was designed to protect Seagate’s own turf. After all, a Seagate victory in the suit could pave the way for cross-licensing agreements, not just with STEC, but with other SSD makers as well.

Three days after the New York Times reported that an unnamed Chinese technology company was intent on acquiring Seagate, the hard-drive maker said that wasn’t really the case. “Seagate is not for sale,” said company spokesman Woody Monroy.

Seems the acquisition over which Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said “the U.S. government is freaking out” is largely a hypothetical one. “In general there has been speculation or discussion that there are some Chinese companies that would be interested in buying an American disk-drive company,” Monroy said. “I think Bill [Watkins] was speaking in general [terms to the New York Times]. There’s nothing, from our perspective, more to say about that other than to clarify that Seagate is not for sale. We haven’t had any offers or bids made for Seagate.”