Karima Bawa, RIM’s chief legal officer, has left the company, becoming the latest long-serving executive to leave the beleaguered BlackBerry manufacturer since Thorsten Heins became CEO earlier this year.
The move comes ahead of more expected job cuts at the company as it seeks to revive its fortunes following a number of setbacks in recent years.
Thorsten Heins was appointed CEO in January, replacing longtime co-chief executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. He has begun a restructuring of the company and Bawa’s departure follows that of chief operating officer Jim Rowan, head of software David Yach, senior vice president for the BlackBerry platform Alan Brenner, and Alistair Mitchell, vice president for BlackBerry Messenger.
The restructuring is not only going to affect those at executive level. The company plans to reduce its workforce from 16,500 to around 10,000 by early next year, according to reports, with redundancies believed to affect those in RIM’s legal, marketing, sales, operations and human resource divisions.
RIM has endured a number of difficult years as BlackBerry sales have been eroded by competition from rival smartphones such as those running Google’s Android mobile operating system and the Apple iPhone.
Its suffering was compounded last October by a worldwide data outage that left users around the world unable to access BlackBerry data services. Much of RIM’s hopes rest on the launch of smartphones running BlackBerry OS 10, which is due to launch later this year, following a number of delays.
What do you know about the iPhone’s rivals? Find out with our quiz!
Tesla retreats from pioneering gigacasting manufacturing process, amid cost cutting and challenges at EV giant
No skynet please. After the US, UK and France pledge human only control of nuclear…
Microsoft's AI investments continue in south east Asia, after investments in Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, as…
New chapter for LastPass as it becomes an independent company to focus on cybersecurity, after…
US FCC seeks to ban Chinese telecom firms at centre of national security concerns from…
Two updates to Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude sees arrival of a new business-focused plan, as…