Blackberry To Cut 4500 Jobs After expecting 1 Bln Loss ; Mike Lazardis Might Bid For Company

With slow adoption of Blackberry 10 devices over the last year, thing aren't looking good for Canadian phone maker, Blackberry. There have been rumors of massive lay offs and even a sell-out. Today, the company has confirmed these rumors by announcing that it will trim around 4,500 jobs so as to reduce its operation expenditure by half worldwide. The decision comes as the company is expecting an operating loss of of almost 1 Billion dollars, most of which comes from low sales of its latest range of Blackberry 10 handsets.

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The company said that it shipped around 3.7 million smartphones in the last quarter and manged to rake in sales worth 1.6 billion. As wonderful as this sounds, these numbers match only half the numbers expected by Wall Street.

"We are implementing the difficult, but necessary operational changes announced today to address our position in a maturing and more competitive industry, and to drive the company toward profitability," Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry's President and CEO, announced in a statement.

He also added, "Going forward, we plan to refocus our offering on our end-to-end solution of hardware, software and services for enterprises and the productive, professional end user. This puts us squarely on target with the customers that helped build BlackBerry into the leading brand today for enterprise security, manageability and reliability."

This means that Blackberry will be making an exit from the consumer markets. Also, it will only have four devices on its platter instead of the current number of six. And yes, devices will comprise of variants with touch-screens only and also with the company's famed QWERTY keyboards. The company also announced that there will be a massive price cut to its Z10 handset.

Apart form this, Co-founder and former co-CEO of BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis, has been in some serious discussions with private equity firms. He trying to make his own bid for the Canadian phone company, according to the WSJ.

The news comes after the company failed to meet its promise of rolling out its Blackberry Messenger app for Android phones last weekend. However, the company did mange to roll out its app for iPhone users.

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