2,000 more to go at Motorola

NEWS Motorola has announced plans to cut another 2,000 jobs worldwide by the end of the year, bringing the total number of job cuts to 32,000. Global Telecoms Solutions (GTSS) - which makes infrastructure for mobile phone companies - will be the sector to fall under the cuts. This puts the company's plant in Swindon at risk. In a statement, the company blamed the cuts on "slower growth in the wireless infrastructure market, resulting from delays in capital expenditures by wireless service providers." The company has previously warned that further cuts in the GTSS were likely. The move came as Motorola revised forecasts for sales of telecom infrastructure equipment for the third quarter. They will remain the same as Q2 figures, rather than increasing 5 per cent as the company had previously predicted. However, the company expects to make a smaller loss of 5 to 8 cents per share for Q3, compared to the 11 cents per share it lost in Q2. The mobile telecoms infrastructure has been very badly hit by the downturn in the telecoms market as a whole, as operators struggle to fund the massive costs of rolling out the networks on top of the heavy cost of licences.