NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry devices, said Monday that it would cut more than 2,000 jobs as part of a previously announced cost-cutting effort.
The Walterloo, Ontario-based company said the cuts amount to over 10% of its total workforce. RIM’s headcount will be reduced to about 17,000 after the pink slips are handed out this week.
RIM was once the leader of the smartphone market in North America, but sales have been waning recently as many other device makers have introduced devices with broader appeal.
The latest, greatest BlackBerry smartphone, the Torch, is nearly a year old — an eon in the fast-paced mobile device market. Meanwhile, Apple and Google are now outselling the former heavyweight.
Very disappointing sales of BlackBerry smartphones and its PlayBook tablets during the last quarter led RIM to cut its full-year profit expectations by 30% last month. As a result, RIM announced in June that it would begin a program to “streamline operations,” which would include layoffs.
RIM said the job cuts were focused on “eliminating redundancies and reallocating resources to focus on areas that offer the highest growth opportunities.”
Last month, the company said that one of those growth areas is QNX, the new operating system that powers the PlayBook tablet.
RIM said its forthcoming operating system, BlackBerry OS 7, is also a core focus. BB7 will enable a slew of sexy, high-end product launches across the globe that some analysts hope will lift the company out of its current funk.
But the release of BB7 has been delayed until late August at the earliest. That means the majority of the company’s sales in the meantime have been — and will be for the near term — made up of cheaper, lower-end devices.
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