This is just in. Blackberry Announces 4,500 lay-offs or about 40 % of its staff world-wide rekindling fears of the company's demise and sending its shares into a tailspin as shares fell 23.3% to $8.34 Canadian, hitting their lowest point so far this year, while the company's Nasdaq-listed shares fell 23% to $8.10

It will also report operating loss of over $1Billion Dollars mainly because of poor sales of the new BB Q10 and Z10 as well too much competition for other major smartphone firms

This is coming after BBM software is now available on Samsung Glaxy Smartphones

Want to buy a BlackBerry? Even the struggling smartphone maker considers selling itself

The company, which has struggled to claw back market share from the likes of Apple's iPhone and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd's Galaxy phones, said it expects to report a net operating loss of about $950 million to $995 million for the quarter ended Aug. 31, due to write-downs and other factors.

The results will put more pressure on BlackBerry to find a buyer. The company said last month it is weighing its options, including an outright sale, in the face of persistently lackluster sales of its new smartphones, which run on the BlackBerry 10 operating system.

"The company has sailed off a cliff. What do you expect when you announce you're up for sale?" said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis. "Who wants to commit to a platform that could possibly be shut down?"

BlackBerry said it expects to report revenue for the second quarter of about $1.6 billion, of which roughly 50 percent is expected to be revenue from its services unit. Analysts, on average, had forecast a loss of 15 cents a share on revenue of $3.06 billion, according to

"The revenue and device shipment numbers are pretty surprising given how weak it is," said UBS analyst Amitabh Passi. "I think many of us were expecting a pretty difficult quarter, but this is much worse than we anticipated."

BlackBerry has already undergone a major round of job cuts over the last 12 months. It employed 12,700 people as of March, and once had close to 20,000 employees. The company said it plans to refocus its efforts on the enterprise and high-end consumer markets, offering end-to-end solutions, including hardware, software and services.

Courtesy: CNN


http://www.tutubranch.com/2013/09/blackberry-lay-off-staf.html

Wrong section, this is not political sir