Research in Motion has been rumored in the past few weeks to be making some large layoffs soon and today, RIM has announced that those layoffs are indeed underway. AllThingsD.com reports that the Blackberry phone and OS maker is now telling a number of its workers in its operations, sales, and manufacturing divisions that they won"t be working at the company anymore.
RIM sent out a statement confirming that the company "has reduced some positions" but would not give a specific head count. The statement added that RIM may continue to lay off team members "as the company methodically works through a review of the business."
In late May, rumors hit that RIM was preparing to announce that as many as 2,000 team members would be laid off. Prior to today, the Canadian-based company had about 16,500 employees worldwide.
RIM is still scheduled to launch the Blackberry 10, the next version of its smartphone operating system, along with the first Blackberry 10 based smartphones. sometime before the end of the year. The company revealed a prototype of the Blackberry 10 product in May that it gave out to software developers. However, the OS inside those phones was actually a version of the one that"s being run on the Blackberry Playbook tablet and not Blackberry 10 itself.
Source: AllThingsD.com