RIM Send Home 3,000 More Employees This August

Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion is struggling to regain its foothold on the smartphone market, but it seems that it still faces great challenges. RIM to give the pink slip to more employees this coming month.

According to the latest rumors on the matter, the company is about to send home 3,000 more employees in the next two weeks. To be more precise, Cantech Letter claims that sources familiar with the matter unveiled that RIM would kick off a new wave of layoffs on August 13th. RIM has previously announced that it would give the pink slip to around 5,000 of its employees, and 2,000 of them have already been sent home. The remaining of the 3,000 planned job cuts will occur on August 13 and should end before the second quarter of the company’s fiscal year ends on August 31. The mobile phone maker did not make an official announcement on the matter, but its latest financial results were not encouraging at all.

In fact, the company announced one of its worst financial performances for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2013 several weeks ago. RIM posted net loss of USD$518 million, or $0.99 cents per share. However, it appears that there’s not only the increasingly competitive market environment in the smartphone segment to blame for this state of facts, but also the upcoming release of BlackBerry 10. As it usually happens before a major platform upgrade, sales of older devices are dropping, as users wait for the new OS and for the handsets powered by it. The upcoming BlackBerry 10 could indeed turn the odds in RIM’s favor when it becomes commercially available on new smartphones in the first three months of the next year.

RIM was initially expected to announce the platform this year, but the company said not too long ago that it would delay its release, so as to make sure that it has all things put in place for the general availability.

Research In Motion logo
Image credits to RIM

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