Motorola's prepares to shed half of its Birmingham staff as financial woes continue
Motorola is preparing to take more dramatic steps to rescue its troubled Mobile Devices Division. On Tuesday, all 121 members of staff at its Birmingham facility were told that they were “at risk of redundancy”. Motorola now plans to make half of that number redundant and has said that it is considering closing the site.
There has been trouble at the top too: last weekend, two execs including the Head of Mobile Devices, Stu Reed, left the company. They followed Chief Marketing Officer, Casey Keller’s departure in the week before.
Motorola’s financial strife began after a massive 33% drop in sales during 2007. There were hopes that it might be able to sell the company, but major rivals like Sony Ericsson and LG have greeted the idea with a collective ‘meh’.
Motorola’s financial strife began after a massive 33% drop in sales during 2007. There were hopes that it might be able to sell the company, but major rivals like Sony Ericsson and LG have greeted the idea with a collective ‘meh’.
Part of the problem has been put down to the company being unable to follow up the success of the Razr. Funny how three years ago you could barely open the front door without seeing someone on a Razr and now look at it. Perhaps the reason why Motorola never recaptured the success of the Razr is because it tried to follow it up with an ever increasing list of, err, Razrs.
Apparently no one thought we’d ever get bored of them. Motorola should really have taken a leaf out of LG’s book. The Chocolate sprang to overnight success too and LG did spend a bit of time churning all sorts of silly colours and whatnot, but it was surprising how quickly it turned around and said ‘Hey, you think that was good, well take a look at THIS”.
Or Motorola could have tried a Sony Ericsson approach and carpet bombed the market with handsets of every conceivable size, shape and configuration. Either way’s good.
Hopefully this latest shake up won’t spell the end of the Mobile Devices Division. There are also facilities in Basingstoke, Cambridge and Livingston. These are currently unaffected by the troubles at Birmingham.
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