The Moto workforce keeps shrinking under Lenovo, with another thousand job cuts hitting the Motorola Mobility division.
According to the company, the layoffs affect less than 2 percent of employees worldwide, as the company has 55,000 workers. Most job cuts will impact the mobile phone division.
Droid-Life was the first to report on the new round of layoffs, but Lenovo later confirmed the news to both Droid-Life and The Verge.
"The majority of the positions being eliminated are part of the ongoing strategic integration between Lenovo and its Motorola smartphone business as the company further aligns its organization and streamlines its product portfolio to best compete in the global smartphone market," says the company.
The latest round of layoffs follows the massive job cuts from last year, when Lenovo slashed 3,200 jobs across the company. Lenovo has been trying to properly integrate Motorola ever since the acquisition, but it still has a way to go before settling things down.
Back in May, Lenovo acknowledged that it had failed to integrate Motorola as it should have, as the efforts of the integration did not meet its expectations. The cost of the integration affected Lenovo's performance on the Chinese and North American markets and the company has been trying to rebound.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that it's now laying off another thousand employees from the Moto division, Lenovo says that it still plans to keep the Motorola Mobility headquarters in Chicago. This dismisses previous speculation that Lenovo would shift the remaining staff from Chicago to North Carolina.
It remains to be seen whether the new batch of layoffs will manage to sail Lenovo and Motorola through smoother waters, as the companies face some stiff competition on the mobile market.
A number of innovative and attractive Moto smartphones have hit the scene recently, but the company is not as competitive as it used to be in Motorola's glory days.
Most recently, Motorola tried to convince Apple fanboys that its Moto Z rocking modular extensions called Moto Mods is better than Apple's iPhone 7. Even in its glory days, however, Motorola never attracted the long lines on launch days like Apple did each time it released a new product.
Lenovo's current "strategic integration" of Motorola's smartphone business aims to drive growth and streamline its device lineup so it can better compete on the global smartphone market, but it remains to be seen whether it will make it.
The company adds that the new job cuts were not an easy decision, but they're a necessary step toward ensuring profitable growth in the long run, across all divisions and businesses.
