Research in Motion has been struggling in the past couple of years as its once dominant position in the smartphone marketplace has been cut down by the rise of the iPhone and Android devices. In July, RIM announced it would lay off 2,000 of its workers. Now The Globe and Mail website is reporting via unnamed sources that even more RIM employees may soon be given their walking papers.
The story claims that Canada-based RIM could send notices to at least 2,000 employees, and perhaps more, in the next week. Currently, RIM has about 16,500 team members worldwide, so layoffs of 2,000 people would affect over 10 percent of the company's workforce. The announcements could be made on or before June 1; June 2 is when the company's current fiscal quarter ends.
If this new round of layoffs does indeed happen, it would commence a few months before RIM is scheduled to launch Blackberry 10, the next version of its smartphone operating system, along with the first Blackberry 10 based smartphones. The company revealed a prototype of the Blackberry 10 product earlier this month that it gave out to software developers. However, the OS inside those phones was actually a version of the one that's being run on the Blackberry Playbook tablet and not Blackberry 10 itself.
Source: The Globe and Mail
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