Google has indefinitely suspended the operations of the Motorola phone manufacturing plant in Chennai and laid off 76 workers. Motorola has also sent an e-mail to its employees stating that the company will begin laying off 1,200 employees from its offices in India, China and the U.S. Motorola has said that these layoffs are part of the overall cost-cutting measures that the company had announced last year. Motorola had planned to lay-off a total of 4,000 employees, which would be about 20% of its total workforce.
The email, a copy of which has been analysed by The Wall Street Journal, states that although Motorola is “optimistic” about its new products, it is still suffering from high costs mainly because of its presence in markets (like India, China and the U.S.) where it’s “not competitive” and “losing money.”
In spite of being acquired by Google in 2011, Motorola hasn’t been able to crawl back to profitability. The company declared a loss of more than $350 million in the last quarter of 2012, following the operating loss of $500 million it posted in the third quarter. Motorola products also haven’t really managed to make a splash in global markets and we haven’t seen a big product launch from Motorola in a while.
Motorola will hope to arrest its free-fall with the upcoming flagship smartphone, currently titled the ‘X Phone.’ The X Phone is expected to be revealed at the Google I/O conference in May and made available for purchase in July. It will probably be the platform lead device for Android 5.0 (Key Lime Pie).
