BlackBerry Set to Slash Up To 40 Percent of Its Workforce

This morning I reported that BlackBerry announced the launch of a new smartphone. Just when it seems that BlackBerry is getting back on track and making up some ground, we find out that it’s not hard ground. BlackBerry is preparing to make some deep staff cuts according to a number of reports.

In 2011, BlackBerry had a workforce of more than 17,000 employees. It also held around a 14 percent share of the U.S. smartphone market. Today, just two years later, BlackBerry is holding on to less than three percent of the U.S. and A workforce of about 12,700.

At the end of June, BlackBerry announced its Q1 fiscal 2014 earnings results and the numbers did not look good. Its revenue dropped by 40 percent to $11 billion with a loss of about $646 million, this lead to some layoffs in July.

Most of those layoffs were seen in the sales and research and development divisions. Nearly half of the U.S. sales force was let go. Now we are looking at even more cuts. The latest figures show that as much as 40 percent of BlackBerry’s employees could face the layoff blade.

The difference between the previous rounds of layoffs is that this will affect everyone in all departments across the company. Last year BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins began some rather broad cost-cutting initiatives.

These initiatives were designed to cut about $1 billion from the company’s books. In addition to the layoffs several manufacturing sites were also closed to eliminate cost.

A BlackBerry spokesman said, "Organizational moves will continue to occur to ensure we have the right people in the right roles to drive new opportunities in mobile computing." The spokesman however declined to make any comment concerning the 40 percent figure.

In the past couple of months we have seen layoffs, manufacturing sites shut down and the formation of a board committee to explore the possibility of finding a buyer. This does not bode well for BlackBerry.