Motorola to lay off 2,600 Workers

[OhioChick]

Source: Chicago Tribune

Big losses overseas; cuts part of $500 million plan
April 4, 2008


Motorola Inc. is laying off 2,600 employees across the company, resulting in a pretax charge of $104 million for the first quarter, the Schaumburg-based telecommunications equipment-maker disclosed in a regulatory filing Thursday.

In a separate statement, Motorola said the layoffs are part of a previously announced plan to cut costs by $500 million this year. Executives had disclosed the cost-reducing program at the beginning of 2008 and warned that it could mean job losses. Motorola's employee head count totaled 66,000 at the end of 2007, according to the annual report it filed in February.

The company reports second-quarter earnings on April 24 and is expecting a further decline in sales and global market share for its cell phone unit. Motorola previously announced that it also is planning to split the handset division into an independent, publicly traded company with a new chief executive who has yet to be hired.

A sizable portion of the 2,600 lost jobs will come from Singapore, where the company is planning to halt cell phone manufacturing by the end of this year. The shuttering of those operations will result in the loss of 700 jobs. Motorola said in its 2007 annual report that Singapore, along with China and Brazil, are the company's largest cell phone manufacturing facilities, and the lion's share of its handsets are made in Asia.


Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-fri-motorola-8k-jobcuts-motapr04,0,4870738.story

[Tesha]

1. Does Moto still have many operations around Schaumburg? (NT)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaumburg%2C_Illinois

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola

[DaveJ]

2. Someone said his friend in the Razr phone division got laid off...

The people working on their most successful cell phone product get laid off.

Apparently they no longer plan to continue with the Razr product line.

So much for Meritocracy. That went out of style a long time ago in the corporate world.