The future of Motorola is looking dimmer as time goes by, with a round of lay-offs at the company due to go into effect this week.
Droid-Life has reported that a series of lay-offs will affect more than 700 workers out of just 1200 remaining Moto employees. The lay-offs go into effect this week, with the workers being told they will no longer have a job ‘within the next day’.
According to Lenovo, in a statement given to Droid-Life, the lay-offs are indeed occuring with the impact affecting just 2% of the companies 55,000 workers. That’s Lenovo’s 55,000 workers, meaning up to 1,100 staff could be laid off in total, though Lenovo says the impact will be less.
The statement also refutes a former workers claim that Lenovo intends to move more operations from the companies Chicago headquarters to Lenovo’s China based operations, or to their US-based headquarters in Raleigh North Carolina. Lenovo instead says that they are committed to Chicago and ‘plan to maintain our Motorola Mobility headquarters’ there.
Since purchasing Motorola from Google back in 2014, Lenovo has continued to shrink the workforce at Motorola, scaling back 200 employees around a year ago, and 500 employees just prior to that.
Lenovo has been scaling back Motorola, earlier this year former-CEO Rick Osterloh was quoted as saying they intended to retire the Motorola brand to simply become ‘Moto by Lenovo’ as a face for their Moto series of phones and wearables such as the Moto 360. This scaling back was also an opportunity to unify the phone divisions of both Motorola, and Lenovo and their Vibe and Phab series devices.
As a brand Lenovo has quite a reach, but Motorola has continually failed to get their products into any market other than the US in anything even approaching a timely manner. We’re still waiting on the Moto Z, and the recent launch here of the nearly year old Moto X Force screams of a need to streamline the business. Perhaps this could be a positive move.
Lenovo’s full statement:
Lenovo today announced a resource action impacting less than two percent of its approximately 55,000 employees globally. The majority of the positions being eliminated are part of the ongoing strategic integration between Lenovo and its Motorola smartphone business as the company further aligns its organization and streamlines its product portfolio to best compete in the global smartphone market.
The company is also making adjustments in other areas of the business as part of a continued effort to manage costs, drive efficiency and support ongoing improvement in overall financial performance. While these actions are never easy, they are a necessary part of our continued efforts to ensure long-term, profitable growth across all of our businesses.
Lenovo is absolutely committed to Chicago and we plan to maintain our Motorola Mobility headquarters there. Chicago has a well-deserved reputation for technical excellence and as the hub of our global R&D for our smartphone business we expect to take advantage of local talent to continue developing Moto products there.
All lenovo wanted was the brand and maybe one or two experts. The rest will get closed down – it’s a common story.