Software giant Microsoft has been asked to lay off around 9,100 employees (around 10%) to tell the market that profits are more significant than revenue growth in difficult times.

In a report on Microsoft, Brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Co’s analyst Brad Reback stated that such layoff exercise would be a profitable move for the company.

In his report for the institutional investors of Microsoft, Mr. Reback said that cutting down the staff by 10% would increase company’s earnings per share (EPS) by about 10%.

At the end of July-September (2008) quarter, Microsoft had around 91,000 employees on its payrolls.

In October, the company had put in place a hiring freeze on some of its sections including entertainment and devices businesses, which make products such as X-Box and Zune.

Moreover, there have been some unofficial reports on blogs that Microsoft would announce some major layoffs by January 2009.

Microsoft would declare its second-quarter results for the fiscal year 2008-09 on January 22.

Combating the economic disaster, companies in their bid to save costs, declared over one lakh job cuts during December alone in the US, while so far in 2008 there have been close to 20 lakh layoffs.