Once the king of the smartphone
market, BlackBerry will be laying off up
to 40 percent of its workforce, or about
5,000 workers, by year's end, reports
The Wall Street Journal. The cuts will
come from all divisions of the Waterloo,
Ontario-based company, which at last
count in March had 12,000 workers.
The cuts will be made in waves, with
workers from the sales and research-
and-development divisions having
already received pink slips over the
summer.
The layoffs are of course a response to
how far BlackBerry has fallen in the
smartphone market. In just the past
two years, BlackBerry's share of the
smartphone market has dropped from
14 percent to 3 percent, according to
research firm IDC . The report said that
the company may even be put up for
sale.
BlackBerry has tried to restore its
standing by releasing two new phone
models this year. Both, however, have
failed to gain traction. In a statement to
the business daily, a BlackBerry
spokesman said: "Organizational moves
will continue to occur to ensure we have
the right people in the right roles to
drive new opportunities in mobile
computing."
The layoffs at BlackBerry are the latest
example of what has become an old
story -- demanding and shifting tastes
in the tech sector can result in workers
being left in the dust . As one of
countless examples, LivingSocial was
forced to layoff 400 workers in 2012
after the social commerce website failed
to see its local events and merchant
services campaigns thrive. But tech
firms including Cisco have been
pursuing massive layoffs even during
flush times. The San Jose-based tech
firm has announced that it will let go of
4,000 of its approximately 65,000
workers in the first quarter of 2014. The
move comes even though revenue rose
6 percent year-on-year, as of an August
report.
Big layoffs, of course, have affected
nearly all industries during the financial
crisis . And as AOL Jobs reported to
mark the five-year anniversary of the
collapse of Lehman Brothers, 4 of the
10 employers who have cut the most
jobs since 2008 were in the financial
sector.
In the case of BlackBerry, massive
layoffs are by now old hat. Its problems
led company CEO Thorsten Heins to lay
off 5,000 workers last year after the
company posted a $646 million loss.

source: jobs.aol.com/articles/2013/09/19/blackberry-layoff-thousands-end-2013/