Nicholas-Applegate Lays Off 49 Workers Including 18 Money Managers

Rick Shaughnessy, a spokesman for Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management, said the layoffs — which totaled 49 including non-trading employees — were part of a firmwide reorganization.

On the investment side of the company, Shaughnessy said officials felt many products overlapped and several of the trading teams duplicated responsibilities. For example, Shaughnessy said the company had maintained separate teams for international equity, emerging markets and Pacific Rim, but decided all three needed to be combined.

He said Nicholas-Applegate had also been running teams for large- and mid-cap institutional and teams with the same focus only for managed account customers. Those groups have also been consolidated down to two, he said.

Most of the money manager layoffs are because of the trading team consolidations, Shaughnessy said.

Effective dates on layoffs from the now 328-member firm are staggered starting October 15 and going until April 30, 2003, Shaughnessy said.

Although part of the driver for the reorganization was a goal of improving corporate focus and efficiency, Shaughnessy said the stubborn bear markets that have claimed numerous casualties at investment houses across the country made the slimming down necessary.

“You can’t take away that context,” Shaughnessy told PLANSPONSOR.com. “The market has been brutal for 2 ½ years and that has definitely caused our assets and our revenues to decline. We set out to achieve an appropriate scale to our business given our asset and revenue base.”