Motorola was once a star-studded communications company. Responsible for some of the earliest cellular phones in the industry, along with numerous other feats of engineering over the years, the company has experienced a fall from grace in recent years. In the smartphone world, their early creations were sometimes good, never managed to draw much attention until 2013’s original Moto X. Packed with features and built to compete with the likes of the HTC One M7 and Samsung Galaxy S4, the phone put Motorola on a fast track to the top echelons of the smartphone world. It was around this time that they were bought up by Google, who eventually ended up selling them off to Lenovo. After a few waves of layoffs for both Lenovo and Motorola, a new one came to light on Monday.
This latest layoff according to a statement from Motorola reportedly involves less than 1,100 of the 55,000 Lenovo employees from around the world, a number which Motorola states is around 2 percent of Lenovo’s total staff. Despite the layoffs, Motorola’s statement also highlighted that they are committed to the Chicago area and that they will not be abandoning their headquarters there, which may at least provide somewhat of a silver lining.
Between recent layoffs and this new one, the majority of Motorola’s employees are gone, including a number of big names like former head honcho Rick Osterloh who left on his own after deciding to go back Google earlier this year. Whatever the reason for the layoffs, it seems that nobody is immune to the risk of job loss at the once-great manufacturer’s offices; reports indicate that an employee who is seeing the end of a 20 year tenure with the company ended up breaking the news publicly on Facebook, though the identity of this individual appears to remain confidential due to privacy reasons. Even with the relative success of their budget Moto E and Moto G lineups and the promise imbued in the recently launched Moto Z, one of the first phones on the market to offer modular capabilities, things are not looking very bright for the Moto team at the moment.