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No layoffs at BlackBerry's Indonesian units
BlackBerry Indonesia has said there will be no layoffs in the device makerâs local units despite restructuring efforts to improve the efficiency of the global organization, adding that the country remains a âfocusâ for the Canadian company
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lackBerry Indonesia has said there will be no layoffs in the device maker's local units despite restructuring efforts to improve the efficiency of the global organization, adding that the country remains a 'focus' for the Canadian company.
BlackBerry headquarters stated last month that it planned to lay off 4,500 employees, equal to 40 percent of its global workforce.
The announcement came on the heels of a close to US$1 billion loss in the second quarter.
BlackBerry Southeast Asia senior product manager, Ardo Fadhola, said that there was no plan to cut the size of the Indonesian team.
'We plan to maintain the number of staff here in Indonesia. We have between 45-50 people working from our office in Bali and roughly 30 in our office in Jakarta,' he said.
He added that approximately 90 percent of this staff were Indonesians, including country manager, Maspiono Handoyo.
Ardo said that BlackBerry had no plans let any of its people go in this country as the team was already 'efficiently' run, one of the factors prompting the headquarters to prune staff elsewhere.
'The size of the team is already lean given that certain operations, such as customer and technological support, have been directed to regional hubs such as Singapore and Hong Kong,' he said.
Hence, the Indonesian office would not be subject to redundancies. 'Our team in Jakarta is specifically responsible for the sales and marketing of our products here, with the Bali team in charge of BlackBerry App World globally,' he said.
He further pointed out that the Indonesia office was also efficient because the team, like the others in the Southeast Asian region, had been formed in recent years.
Therefore, the issues that had bogged down earlier-established US and European offices, such as under-productive teams, had largely been avoided, he said.
He added that BlackBerry had more than 200 people working in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, Ardo said that the Indonesian office would undergo 'restructuring' in line with global directives.
The layoffs BlackBerry plans to conduct are part of its major restructuring strategy aimed at reducing operating expenditure by roughly 50 percent by the close of the first quarter of 2015.
'However, the restructuring in Indonesia is more about re-arranging our organizational layout to improve the flow of our chain of command,' he said.
With the restructuring process still in process, BlackBerry Indonesia is unable to foretell its plans to grow the local team.
'We will be hiring based on a review of our needs,' he said, adding that the Indonesian office started off with five people in 2010.
Amid eroding global market share, Indonesia remains as one of BlackBerry's key countries.
The company said earlier this year that the number of daily active users of BlackBerry Messenger in Indonesia surpassed the global average of 60 percent.
