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Jan. 13, 2009

Motorola’s previously disclosed layoffs in its handset and wirless division may arrive Jan. 15. Motorola officials declined to comment however.

CEO Sanjay Jha said in November that a little over 2,980 jobs will be cut, with 2,000 of them coming from the company’s handset division.

At that time, Jha also said that Motorola would be reducing the number of mobile phones and operating systems in its catalog, and that it would re-focus on Google’s Android system but would not immediately sell its handset division after previous efforts to find a suitable buyer failed in September 2008.

Motorola's handset division lost $840 million in the third quarter of 2008, while unit sales dropped over 31.9 percent year-over-year to 25.4 million.

Overall, Motorola’s global market share in mobile phones fell to 8.4 percent in 2008.

A date for the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report is not yet announced, but is expected later in January.

For its part, Sony is also experiencing layoffs as well. By spring 2010, the company will cut about 5 percent of its 160,000 staff globally, company officials said in December.

Sony's mobile phone venture, Sony Ericsson was also affected in Q3 2008.

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Source: Motorola.