RIM to axe 2,000 jobs as Blackberry declines
By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 26 July 2011, 19:40 IST   |    1 Comments
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RIM to axe 2,000 jobs as Blackberry declines
Bangalore: Facing a tough competition from Apple i-Phone and many other mobile phones running in the market, Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM) announced on Monday, that it was cutting 2000 jobs and that its present chief operating officer plans to retire. RIM is to cut 2,000 jobs, or 11 per cent of its workforce, in order to reduce costs and respond to growing pressure from investors. The company also announced Several senior management changes have been announced, which includes the retirement of its chief operating officer, Don Morrison. Morrison has been on temporary leave recovering from an undisclosed illness. RIM is trying hard to maintain its domain against Apple's eye phone and handset using Google's Andriod operating system. Losing more than half of their share value in the past six months, its present market value dwindled from 77 billion dollars to 14.5 billion dollars. Moreover, the stock lost 4.8 percent to close C25.19 dollars in Toronto on Monday. Though announcing the layoffs will not really resolve RIM's fundamental problems, so they have to largely rely on the line of Blackberry phones based on entirely new operating system known as QNX. But those phones, however, will not be for sale until an unspecified point next year. Meanwhile, RIM introduced phones with an improved version of its decade-old operating system.The company's move into the tablet computer market with the BlackBerry PlayBook also proved disappointing, as the device was introduced without many major features, including e-mail software. While the company did not disclose any information regarding their employees or what roles they perform, the majority of its work force is in Waterloo, Ontario, a city west of Toronto where RIM has its headquarters. At the end of February, when its year ended, RIM reported that it had 17,500 employees. The cuts will give RIM about 17,000 employees. Several employees left the company with their own accord. Brian Wallace, the former vice president of digital marketing and media, recently joined Samsung Mobile. Soon after, he was followed to Samsung by Ryan Bidan, a former Microsoft Games executive who was the senior product manager for the PlayBook.

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