Laying off employees still remains the first step as conglomerates bid to restructure themselves inorder to curb their southwards fall.
In the last few weeks we’ve had Nokia downsizing their staff, followed by RIM which reduced their staff by 5,000 last week and this week it’s Motorola’s turn as they cut a further 20 % of their staff and also shut down many of their offices.
As per the New York Times, the Google owned Motorola is cutting down on approximately 4,000 of their staff members 1/3 of which will be from the US and closing down about 94 offices across the globe. At the same time it has also handed the pink slip to about 40% of Moto’s Vice Presidents and also plans to shrink operations in Asia and India along with closure of center for research and development in Chicago, Sunnvale and Beijing.
Google had been grilled in the last quarter earnings about the acquisition of Motorola which has been bleeding through ears even after the overtaking. Importantly, Google defended the move by saying that it had more to do with the patent portfolio than the hardware.
As Google dismantles Motorola, we somehow feel that Google actually meant it and they are gearing up to reshape Motorola Mobility into more of an IP player than a full fledged manufacturer; thus reducing it to a small pie of the actual dominant manufacturer that it was once.
As per NYT, Google is also looking to reduce the number of suppliers, thus concentrating on a dedicated few, thus bringing down its costs and perhaps giving a slight boost to its profit margins in the process. Though, its now becoming clear that now Motorola like HTC will conventrate only on introducing a few select quality handsets as they look to go much leaner, giving Google the opportunity to control teir spendings hence minimising losses at the same time.
Google it seems now is much more involved in Motorola than it was any time in the past getting their hands dirty in the process with the laying off of employees and closure of Motorola’s office spaces across the globe.
