Research In Motion has confirmed that it will sack more than 2,000 people. The Canada-based dying giant will trim its total workforce by 10% after this layoff exercise, reducing it to 17,000 people. This is expected to be completed this week. They also made some changes in the management with the retirement of the COO, Don Morrison who was replaced by Thorsten Heins.
Nevertheless, the duo-CEO model remains in place. This is one of the companies where two people run the show, in the persons of Jim Balsillie and Mike Laziridis.
Few years ago, before the age of iPhone, RIM’s blackberry was the best berry in town. They were doing well with shares getting nearly to $90. Today, the share is below $40. They used to the giant in this game, but they have lost the baton to Apple and Google powered OS smartphones.
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With no working strategy in sight since Blackberry phones and Playbook tablets continue to stall in warehouses, the best way to reduce expenses is human counts. And that is exactly what Blackberry is doing. They have noted that the job cuts were designed around “eliminating redundancies and reallocating resources to focus on areas that offer the highest growth opportunities.”
One of the most promising areas for RIM right now is the QNX operating system which was created for its Playbook tablet. The challenge is just the advertising muscle and the support from 3rd party developers.
There is also the planned release of BB7 which has been pushed to August thereby putting more pressure on old devices which have been in the market for up to a year. It is expected that BB7 will do the magic because it is sleek and cool. BB7 is the Blackberry OS7 operating system which has been on work for sometime now.
Tekedia does not think that few of the BB staff in Africa will be affected by this worldwide layoffs. And we still doubt if this will work as what is killing BB remains in place and that is iPhone.