Motorola may end India operations

Earlier this month Motorola announced that it will axe 20 percent of its global work force, and shut almost a third of its offices across the world. As per a report by BGR.in, it appears that this process is already underway, and the Google-acquired brand is now shutting down its operations in India.

Motorola shutting shop in India?

As per the report, “Motorola is shutting down its operations in India and across Asia Pacific, industry sources have confirmed to BGR India. The news comes after Motorola Mobility CEO, Dennis Woodside, confirmed the company would be letting go of 20 percent of its work force and would be shrinking its India operations. Emails and calls to Motorola Mobility’s APAC region PR and employees at Motorola Mobility India remain unanswered”. The report goes on to add that only those employees who have US related product projects will manage to retain their jobs.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in May this year. Motorola Mobility, which separated from the now-independent Motorola Solutions experienced heavy losses last year. Google said in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, _“These changes are designed to return Motorola’s mobile devices unit to profitability, after it lost money in fourteen of the last sixteen quarte_rs”.

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The Motorola management will also do away with about 40 percent of its Vice Presidents. According to reports, the job cuts may set Google back by $275 million in severance-related charges. As per a report by The New York Times, the move is one of the first steps by Google in its bid to reinvent loss-making Motorola, and augment the Android platform and expand beyond just search and software into hardware manufacturing. Reportedly, the mobile manufacturer has lost $233 million in its first six weeks under Google.

The New York Times reports that one-third of the 4,000 jobs lost would be in the US. The report cites Dennis Woodside, Motorola’s new chief executive, as saying that the company plans to leave unprofitable markets, stop making low-end devices and focus on a few cellphones instead of dozens. “Woodside also plans to cut the number of devices Motorola makes from the 27 it introduced last year to just a few. He wants to make the company’s products cool again by loading them with things like sensors that recognise who is in a room based on their voices, cameras that take crisper photos and batteries that last for days,” the report states.

Woodside had said Google benefited from many manufacturers’ using Android and repeated Google’s promise that Motorola would have no advantages. He said Motorola would also compete equally with others to build Google-branded Nexus devices, which Google makes with a hardware partner when it introduces new versions of Android.

The report by BGR.in went on to mention that the brand would continue to sell its products in India till stocks dried up and that their service centres would be operational. They also stated that independent real estate companies had informed them that the property of the brand’s R&D facility in Hyderabad had been put up for sale.