Motorola Cuts Jobs Again
Motorola
(MOT)
is swinging the ax again as the troubled handset maker continues to restructure.
The Schaumburg, Ill., company said late Thursday it will cut about 2,600 employees and will take a pretax charge of about $104 million in the first quarter. In a regulatory filing, Motorola said that charges include $113 million for severance costs, which will be offset by $9 million of reversals for accruals from previous periods that are no longer needed.
The move comes just over a week after Motorola said it will
split its operations
into two separate publicly traded companies, splintering off its handset unit from the remaining core of the company. What's left will consist of a cable set-top box operation, a wireless networking infrastructure business and a security and government services venture.
Shares of Motorola were off by a penny, or 0.1%, to $9.76. For the year, the stock is down more than 38%.
In June, the company slashed 3,500 jobs under the direction of former CEO Ed Zander following a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report.
Job-cutting is of course nothing new in the telecom space, particularly on the equipment side, where thousands of workers have been let go in recent years.
Nortel
(NT)
,
Alcatel-Lucent
(ALU)
,
Nokia
(NOK) - Get Report
and
Tellabs
(TLAB)
are among those who have pared their work forces.