Beleaguered BlackBerry to ax workforce by up to 40%

13 years ago

“Struggling BlackBerry Ltd. is sharply paring its workforce,” Will Connors reports for The Wall Street Journal. “The device maker is preparing for deep staff cuts—up to 40% of its employees—by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.”

“The layoffs will cut across all departments and occur in waves, likely affecting several thousand workers, the people said. BlackBerry had 12,700 employees as of this March, the last time it disclosed a total number,” Connors reports. “The cuts come as the once dominant smartphone maker looks for ways to get a handle on costs and shrink its operations to better fit a world in which competitors such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co have eaten deeply into its market share.”

Connors reports, “Smaller rounds of layoffs began earlier this summer, mostly from the sales and research-and-development divisions, and follow the loss of 5,000 jobs last year. Some employees have been told which of the new waves of cuts will affect them, one of the people said. The scale of the planned layoffs paints a stark picture of just how far the Waterloo, Ontario-based company has fallen. Two years ago, BlackBerry had more than 17,000 employees and 14% of the U.S. smartphone market, according to IDC. Now, it has less than 3% of the U.S. market.”

Read more in the full article here.

“While it may not be popular to say, there are reasons to think that Blackberry could go the way of Palm. Both were once market share leaders in the early days of the smartphone market and both had their own operating systems,” Christopher Versace writes for Forbes. “As more players entered the smartphone market, Palm’s inability to grow its product portfolio and ramp product with multiple carriers at a time put it on a path that led to its being sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.2 billion before it was ultimately shut down. Remember too that Microsoft bought Danger, which did nothing to improve its mobile position.”

Versace writes, “The sad news is this smartphone bloodbath is only going to get worse. As history has shown, most markets consolidate around three major players that have the bulk of the market share. Currently that is Samsung and Apple, with a number of companies trying to land that third spot.”

MacDailyNews Take: If there is a third spot, it is not going to be occupied by BlackBerry, née Research in Stagnation.

Time’s quickly running out on Amateur Hour.