Motorola Mobility to ‘shrink’ India ops, cut 4,000 jobs globally

Motorola Mobility told employees on Sunday it would lay off 20 percent of its workforce and close a third of its 94 global offices. While a third of the 4,000 employees being laid off will be from the US, Motorola will shrink its operations in India and Asia apart from letting go of 40 percent of its vice presidents. The company plans to leave unprofitable markets, stop making low-end devices and focus on a few cellphones instead of dozens, said Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s new chief executive, in an interview with NYT.
Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion primarily for its 17,000 patents in order to be able to defend itself and its hardware partners that were being sued over the use of Android operating system. However, Google maintained it would keep the company’s hardware business after the acquisition. Google made Dennis Woodside as the unit’s CEO and hired senior executives from DARPA, Amazon, Nvidia and Nokia among others. “Our aim is simple: to focus Motorola Mobility’s remarkable talent on fewer, bigger bets, and create wonderful devices that are used by people around the world,” Woodward had said in a statement announcing the deal.
Regina Dugan, a former director at DARPA, who joined the Motorola team after Google’s acquisition is already heading a team named Advanced Technology and Products. Under Google, Motorola would launch fewer phones but ones that will recognize people from their voice, click better pictures and have better batteries. She is already hiring metal scientists, acoustics engineers and artificial intelligence experts for Motorola’s next generation of smartphones.