Symantec leaders stress latest round of layoffs is almost complete

While Symantec's fiscal first quarter earnings report looked pretty good, the leadership team couldn't avoid questions regarding ongoing layoffs.

See also: Symantec beats Q1 estimates, misses Q2 outlook target

To recall, Symantec has had a reorganization plan in place since January with hundreds (if not potentially thousands) of jobs expected to be cut over the course of 2013.

During the quarterly conference call on Tuesday afternoon, Symantec CEO Steve Bennett stressed that the blood-letting is almost over at the Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered company:

By the end of July, we will be almost done with our organizational simplification initiative, bringing the number of management layers and spans of control closer to industry standards and reducing our management structure [by] 30 percent to 40 percent. In addition, we removed some redundancies across the organization during the last quarter, resulting in the elimination of some individual contributor positions.

Executives often danced around the topic throughout the call, deferring usually toward the subject of "restructuring costs" instead.

Nevertheless, chief financial officer James Beer acknowledged that "employee layoff notifications occurred in May and June," continuing through the present month. Executives also repeated that the sales department was the most affected by the reorganization plan.

Beer added that the balance of Symantec's projected severance and benefits payments will ring up to anywhere between $220 million to $250 million throughout the rest of the fiscal year.

Symantec stock was up by roughly 3.1 percent to $25.11 per share in after-hours trading.