RIM Prepares to Cut 2,000 More Jobs as it Tries to Stay Afloat

From DailyTech: Waterloo, Ontario based Research in Motion, Ltd. (TSE:RIM) used to be the darling of the smartphone industry. For a time "BlackBerry" was almost synonymous with "smartphone", but today RIM has fallen on hard times. It can hardly convince customers to buy its smartphones, let alone its flopped tablet, despite the price being slashed from $500 USD to around $200 USD.

Desparate times call for desparate measures, and a report in top Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail indicated this week that RIM would be axing 2,000 jobs worldwide, from its roughly 16,500 workers. That 12 percent reduction in workforce is a sign of just how dire things are for the phonemaker, who is facing the prospect of a sale or bankruptcy.

An anonymous executive told The Globe and Mail, "They’ve been axing people on the sly for months. Lots of guys are being packaged out right now." an executive is quoted as saying."

At its pinnacle around 2009, RIM employed over 20,000. With the latest cuts, RIM's global workforce will have shrunk by almost 28 percent.

The layoffs are expected to begin June 1, a day before RIM announces its latest fiscal quarterly results -- which some fear will be another loss. Some employees are expected to be pressured to take early retirements and buyout incentives, others will be directly laid off.

The cuts could save RIM $1B USD, but that could be a short term solution, given that the company lost $125M USD (an eighth of a billion) in Q1 2012, and many expect those losses to accelerate as sales shrink.

View: Article @ Source Site