Motorola Mobility to cut 4,000 jobs

Trade

Motorola Mobility is cutting 4,000 employees as the company shifts its emphasis from feature phones to focus on smartphones and tablets.

Motorola, which was acquired by Google in May, plans to close or to consolidate about a third of its 90 facilities, as well as simplify its mobile product portfolio, making a shift from feature phones to more "innovative and profitable" devices, the company said.

Google had so far not discussed what it plans to do with Motorola, with some speculating that it bought the company primarily for its patents, and may not be interested in its mobile hardware business in a cutthroat market.

The Internet giant has however unveiled its own hardware products including the Nexus 7 tablet running the Android operating system at its recent I/O developers conference in San Francisco

Motorola brought in $1.25 billion in revenue in the quarter that ended 30 June, about 10% of Google’s total revenue. But Motorola also accounted for an operating loss of $233 million, which brought Google’s total operating income down as a percent of its revenue by 6 percentage points.

Motorola plans to cut the number of devices the company makes from the 27 it introduced last year to just a few, Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s new chief executive, told The New York Times. He plans to make products that are cool again, and include for example sensors that recognize who is in a room from their voices, cameras that take crisper photos, and batteries that last for days, according to the newspaper.

IDG News Service

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