Canadian company Research in Motion, best known for its production of BlackBerry phones and the PlayBook tablet has announced that it will be cutting jobs up to 2,000 personnel. This is a big cut, since the company has a global staff of 16,500, so it’s losing about 1/8 of its employees.
This is done to save $1 billion in costs and a person familiar with the situation told the press that layoffs may even surpass that number. The firings will be announced before the financial results are in on June 2nd. A big cut was already done a while ago, at the peak of 20,000 staff, when BlackBerry phones were still selling. The company has lost serious market share to Apple and Android devices and the only thing RIM has in its future is a 4G PlayBook and BB OS 10.
The Canadian phone and tablet maker refused to comment on this matter, although it’s the CEO Thorsten Heins that’s saying that there’s a need for $1 billion slashed in costs. Whatever gets them through… I wonder how long it will be till the likes of Microsoft or Samsung buy this company.
