Motion Computing, a leading hardware vendor in the Tablet space, is laying off 15 - 20% of its employees.
Here are some details (emphasis added):
- The reduction in work force is 15 - 20%, comprising of about 40 employees.
- The cuts are coming from three different areas in the company: 1) Reduction of inside sales to utilizing 100% of channel partners, 2) removal of a duplication of effort between Motion and their manufacturing partners (Compal and Pegatron) , 3) admin and marketing. The biggest cuts are coming from #1 and #2 above.
- This is the third series of layoffs in the last 12 months, the most recent coming in December. The first layoff, in April of last year, was due to the cancellation of a development project.
- Motion is still experiencing 30% growth year to year, but were projecting more. They are not hitting previously set milestones which were used to justify personnel hires, so they are having to bring expenses in line with current revenue.
- Milestones were originally set without fully comprehending the extremely long adoption cycle in the healthcare field, in which they are marketing the C5 Tablet PC. It is taking much longer than originally thought to move from trial to implementation (ie, closing the sales loop). They feel very good about the F5 and the Field Force vertical, which should bring the points in the adoption cycle much closer together.
- The current sales pipeline looks very healthy and they are still encouraged about the healthcare vertical space.
Tablet haters and sceptics will cite this as bad news for the Tablet PC platform, but it looks like their business is healthy.
They're just not hitting the sales targets they expected, which is more indicative of the economy in general.
[found via Gotta Be Mobile via Warner's Twitter feed]