Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Sun Microsystems Inc., waiting for European regulators to approve its acquisition by Oracle Corp., plans to cut as many as 3,000 jobs, or about 10 percent of the workforce, to pare expenses over the next 12 months.

The cuts will occur around the world, Sun said today in a filing. Sun is losing about $100 million a month, Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said in September. Sun expects to incur $75 million to $125 million in costs, mostly for severance expenses, according to the filing.

European approval is among the final hurdles in the $7.4 billion acquisition announced in April. Regulators said they are taking a deeper look at the deal because of “serious doubts” about competition in the database market. The more time the European Commission takes, the more Sun loses, Ellison told a technology-industry event last month in San Jose, California. The delay is “not good for anyone,” he said then.

Sun, the fourth-largest server computer maker, had 29,000 employees as of June 30.

In August, Sun reported a fourth-quarter loss of $147 million and said sales dropped 31 percent to $2.63 billion.

“Their business has gotten weaker since Oracle bought them,” Heather Bellini, an analyst at ISI Group, said in an interview from in New York. “The longer it takes for this deal to get approved, the worse it gets from a jobs perspective as competitors keep taking business from Sun.”

More Cuts

Oracle will probably cut more positions after the purchase, Bellini said. “We think it will be a lot higher than 10 percent,” said Bellini, who advises investors to buy Oracle’s shares and doesn’t rate Sun.

When Redwood City, California-based Oracle announced its intention to buy Sun, the company said it expected the deal to boost profit excluding acquisition costs by 15 cents a share, or $1.5 billion in operating income, within a year of closing the purchase.

Oracle, which has bought more than 50 companies since January 2005, has a history of cutting jobs to achieve profit goals. The company fired 5,000 workers after its $10.3 billion hostile takeover of PeopleSoft Inc. in 2005, and 2,000 more a week after acquiring Siebel Systems Inc. in 2006.

Sun had no comment beyond the filing, said Karen Kahn, a spokeswoman for the Santa Clara, California-based company. Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Redwood City, California- based Oracle, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment.

Sun fell 10 cents to $9.01 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. Oracle declined 23 cents to $22.19.

The company was co-founded in 1982 by Chairman Scott McNealy, who turned over the chief executive officer job to Jonathan Schwartz in April 2006 after overseeing five years of losses. Schwartz introduced less costly products to stem customer defections to Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. In November 2008, Schwartz said he would cut as many as 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of the staff, to cope with the recession.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rochelle Garner in San Francisco at rgarner4@bloomberg.net; Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at cguglielmo1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 20, 2009 18:19 EDT