Motorola says global layoffs to affect China as employees protest in Beijing

Motorola Mobility said Friday that layoffs announced earlier this month would affect the company's China staff, a move that forms part of its new owner Google Inc.'s decision to chop 20% of the mobile device maker's workforce globally.

Although Motorola Mobility spokesman, Will Moss, did not go into details about the layoffs, local Chinese media reported the company will be cutting at least 1,000 China jobs, and images and videos of employees protesting in front of Motorola's Beijing offices spread around China's microblogs Friday.

In one video roughly 100 protestors stood held up a sign that read:"(You) take my patents, kill my brother," in reference to Google's recent buyout of Motorola, a move that was widely characterized as a play for Motorola's trove of wireless patents.

The job cuts are part of a broader move to cut 4,000 employees from Motorola's roughly 20,000 person work force. In early August, Google posted a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announcing that two-thirds of the layoffs would take place outside of the U.S., and that the company would "close or consolidate" one-third of its 90 facilities. Motorola has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Tianjin.

Although Motorola has had a historically strong presence in China, offering popular China-only models that facilitated writing Chinese characters, their market share has dwindled with the rise of Apple Inc.'s iPhone and Android offerings from companies like Samsung Electronics Co. In the first quarter of 2012 Motorola's China smartphone market share fell to 4.75% from 7.3% in the same period a year earlier, according to research firm Analysys International.

In May, Chinese regulators cleared Google's $12.5 billion bid for Motorola on the condition Google keep Android free and available without discriminating against any particular device maker for five years. Google has had rocky relations with China since early 2010, when it publicly said it wouldn't adhere to China's censorship policies and moved its web search and other services to Hong Kong.

Several of the protestors' signs specifically blamed Google for the layoffs, and one employee told Dow Jones Newswires he blamed the layoffs on Google's poor relationship with China.

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Source: http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=475723

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