Motorola to lay off another 10% of its employees

It’s been a rough ride for Motorola recently, even after its acquisition by Google back in mid 2011, and even rougher if you’re one of its employees. Only last October the company laid off 20% of all its employees, around 4000 members of staff, in a bid to cut overheads. But it seems that the first round of job cuts simply wasn’t enough, as the company still posted a $350 million operating loss in the fourth quarter of 2012.
These fears were confirmed in an email sent out to employees earlier this week, stating that the company’s “costs are too high, we’re operating in markets where we’re not competitive and we’re losing money”.
Unfortunately Motorola’s continuing under-performance has led to an inevitable new wave of redundancies, with a further 10% of its workforce set to lose their jobs throughout the US, China, and India. A spokesperson for Motorola said:

“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.”

This is certainly sad news, but it can’t really come as a surprise when Google itself just a few days ago claimed that new Motorola products weren’t going to impress consumers, and that it was struggling to work its way through an 18 month pipeline of products before it could transition into bringing more innovative designs to market.
It wasn’t all negativity though, in the same email it was noted that the company is “very optimistic” about its new up and coming products. Perhaps we could see a new Nexus handset from Motorola, or maybe even the first device with a new Android operating system. A big announcement like that would definitely help the struggling tech company.
We’ll just have to wait and see whether or not these unannounced new products can live up to the tough competition and turn Motorola’s fortunes around.