Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Seagate Technology, the world’s biggest maker of hard-disk drives, plans to cut jobs and reorganize the company as it copes with the slumping economy, Chief Executive Officer William Watkins said.

“We are going to announce another round, and we think we’ll do it in January,” Watkins said today in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “There will be restructuring, and there will be some layoffs.”

The recession is crimping orders for personal computers, sapping demand for Seagate’s storage products. The company’s biggest rival, Western Digital Corp., announced plans last month to eliminate 2,500 jobs. In 2006, Seagate said it would shed about 6,400 jobs after acquiring Maxtor Corp. for $1.9 billion.

Seagate, based in George Town, Grand Cayman, rose 4 cents to $5.64 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares dropped 83 percent last year.

Watkins declined to comment on the number of job cuts. The company had about 54,000 employees as of last June, the same amount as a year earlier. Seagate is operated from Scotts Valley, California.

Seagate closed a plant in Northern Ireland in 2007, shifting production to a lower-cost factory in Malaysia. It also announced plans in September to shut a research lab in Pittsburgh, saving $30 million a year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: January 9, 2009 16:19 EST