Motorola to Cut 3,000 Employees

Sell on the rumor, sell even more on the news? Motorola has confirmed earlier reports that it will be cutting jobs in earnest, PC World reports, saying late Friday that $800 million in cuts planned for 2009 will require laying off about 3,000 workers.

A spokesperson said in the article that of the company’s current tally of 66,000 employees, about 3,000 layoffs will be made globally “across all businesses and functions” with a “little over two-thirds of these layoffs in the handset division.”

Ellen Daley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said in the article that the layoffs are necessary, even though they will obviously be hard on the individual workers. “They have to do something at Motorola,” she said in the report. “They are losing market share, they are bleeding and they are inefficient. Job cuts happen when you are not making enough money to support the jobs.”

Motorola hasn’t had a hit product since the original, non-mobile-media-capable RAZR in 2004, which stopped making money early on, after the company decided to flood the market with variations that eventually became free after signing a two-year contract.

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