FileNet Corp. Stock Drops $7.75 a Share : Decline: The company, which expects a $9.9-million loss for the fourth quarter, plans to lay off 10% to 15% of its employees.

FileNet Corp.’s shares plunged 34% Monday after the Costa Mesa company announced that it expects to report a loss of nearly $10 million for the fourth quarter of what otherwise would have been a respectable year.

The company’s stock fell $7.75 a share to close at $15 in trading on the NASDAQ market.

FileNet also announced a restructuring program that will include laying off from 10% to 15% of its 1,000 employees worldwide this year.

“It is part of a process to bring operating costs down,” Mark St. Clare, FileNet’s chief financial officer, said Monday. Most of the layoffs will be during the current quarter, he said, adding that the company has not yet determined how many of the jobs will be cut in Orange County.

FileNet, one of the largest makers of document-processing computer systems, said its sales for the quarter ended Jan. 3 were $11 million short of expectations. As a result, the company said, it expects to report a loss of $9.9 million, or 94 cents a share, for the quarter and a loss of $6.2 million, or 59 cents a share, for the year.

A year ago, the company posted a fourth-quarter profit of $3.3 million, or 30 cents a share, and annual income of $8.1 million, or 75 cents a share.

Revenue for the latest quarter will be about $33.5 million, the company said, or 9% below the $37 million reported for the same period a year earlier. Annual revenue is expected to be higher, however--$140 million, up 14% from $122.5 million for 1991.

FileNet will release the final annual figures next month, St. Clare said.

“Since we were so far off, we felt we had to disclose this information as soon as possible,” he said.

Until a number of anticipated sales collapsed at the end of the year, FileNet “had been surviving the recession pretty well,” St. Clare said.

“This took us very much by surprise,” he said. “We have a fairly long sales cycle, and in most cases we were well along in the cycle and expecting to see closure in December.”

Because FileNet makes an expensive computer system that sells for $500,000 to $700,000, even a few failed transactions can wreak havoc on its revenue, said Robert M. Johnson, an analyst with Chicago Corp.

“FileNet had been working with these companies for six months,” he said. “Then someone at the board level says, ‘We don’t like the way the economy is looking,’ and suddenly the sale disappears.”

Johnson added, however, that FileNet should recover from the disappointing quarter by mid-1993. “It’s a fine company with no debt that is in a good position to bounce back,” he said.

The company noted that its sales fell off both in the United States and in Europe, and it attributed the declines to the weak economy.