It is no big secret that Google bought Motorola some time ago. Along with that buyout, Google was entitled to make a few changes. Unfortunately for the men and women working for Motorola, one of those changes was to lay off 20% of the workforce in the coming months. Also, in addition to those 4000 layoffs, the company was also planning on closing a third of the 94 facilities and focusing on the hubs in Sunnyvale, California, Chicago and Beijing and reduce a bit its presence in Asia and India. The upper class was to suffer a bit as well as 40% of the Moto Mobility vice presidents were to be laid off as well.
Perhaps one of the more fruitful things from that restructuring was changing the focus from quantity to quality. Thus, fewer devices were being released. That may have had some repercussions as the companies supplies orders were reduced by as much as a half. It seemed that Motorola was taking the HTC way from earlier this year and putting their money on the idea that fewer high-end devices will bring more cash than a dozen of low-end offerings. The Taiwanese company had a few rough months after that too, but they eventually got through as revenues bounced back in Q2.
But now, after all that was said had been done, another email seems to have surfaced. Motorola Mobility has sent an email to its workforce announcing that 10% of the personnel was going to be laid off, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The email in question, the one affecting about 1200 employees in the US, China and India states that: “while we’re very optimistic about the new products in our pipeline, we still face challenges”. Below you can find what the actual quote given by the Motorola representative at the WSJ.
These cuts are a continuation of the reductions we announced last summer. It’s obviously very hard for the employees concerned, and we are committed to helping them through this difficult transition.
Google is continuing to streamline Motorola Mobility after in August last year more than 4000 people were laid off leaving the smartphone manufacturer with 11113 employees in their service. For the people working there, one can only hope you’ve done your job right and aren’t facing the grim words which were so easily flung about in The Apprentice.
