Motorola announced that it was cutting its global workforce by 4.5%, or some 3,000 employees, and delaying the spinoff of its troubled cell phone unit.
Motorola, the largest US mobile phone manufacturer, announced the job cuts just hours after reporting a quarterly net loss of nearly $400m and said more than two-thirds of the layoffs would be in the handset division.
The ailing company had 66,000 employees worldwide at the end of 2007.
The largest US mobile phone manufacturer said in a statement that it suffered a net loss of $397m in the third quarter of the year after reporting a net profit of $60m the same time last year.
It lowered its forecast for the rest of the year and said it would carry out cost-cutting moves next year expected to result in annual savings of some $800m. It said separation of the struggling mobile phone unit from the rest of the company was now 'targeted beyond 2009'.
'While our strategic intent to separate the company remains intact, we are no longer targeting the third quarter of 2009,' said Sanjay Jha, Motorola co-chief executive and head of its mobile devices division.
Jha, who took over the mobile devices unit in August, attributed the delay to 'the macroeconomic environment, stresses in the financial markets and the changes underway in Mobile Devices'.
The Wall Street Journal reported during the week that Motorola plans to cut back on the number of software platforms it uses in its mobile phones. Jha is looking at using Google's Android open-source operating system and just two other software platforms - Microsoft's Windows Mobile and its own P2K platform - and would abandon at least four other platforms, the newspaper said.
Motorola has been losing ground in recent years to Apple and RIM as well as other major mobile phone makers such as Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.
The world's fourth-largest mobile phone maker reported third-quarter sales of $7.5 billion, down 15% from the same time last year. It said sales of mobile devices totaled $3.1 billion in the quarter, down 31% from a year ago, and the unit rang up an operating loss of $840m compared with a loss of $248m a year ago.
