Motorola Mobility cutting 500 jobs from Chicago workforce

Motorola Mobility, the maker of mobile devices for China-based Lenovo, is losing about a quarter of its Chicago workforce, a company spokesman said Thursday.

Some 500 jobs will be cut from the current roster of 2,000 employees at the company's Merchandise Mart headquarters, which they moved into from Libertyville more than a year ago, spokesman William Moss said.

"The offices will continue to be our global headquarters," he said.

The move comes on the heels of the release of Lenovo's first-quarter earnings report, which showed revenue up $10.7 billion worldwide, an increase of 3 percent.

The quarterly report stated Motorola Mobility's parent company plans on "restructuring the Mobile Business Group to align smartphone development, production and manufacturing, and better leverage the complementary strengths of Lenovo and Motorola."

The report indicated plans to cut jobs by stating "a faster, leaner business model will better leverage Lenovo's global sales force and accelerate" efficiency.

Moss said the cuts will affect Motorola Mobility positions "across all teams and departments."

The earnings report claimed an increase in sales of smartphones, growing 2.3 percent, but an actual market share decline of 0.5 percent among all users. Lenovo is the world's fifth-largest smartphone vendor, according to the report.

However, it went on to point out that Motorola Mobility's "smartphone shipments" were down 31 percent from last year, blaming the decline on a number of factors.

The report said Lenovo still anticipates Motorola Mobility will be profitable within nine months, due in part to the "restructuring actions announced today."

Motorola Mobility was created from the split-up of Schaumburg-based Motorola in 2011 and was acquired by Google in 2012 for $12.4 billion in a move that eventually proved costly for the search engine giant. Lenovo bought the company from Google for $2.91 billion in 2014.