BlackBerry Sacks 250 Employees

They’re swinging the axe again over at BlackBerry. The struggling smartphone pioneer, which last year cut thousands of jobs, cut a few hundred more earlier this week.

In a statement to AllThingsD, a BlackBerry spokesman confirmed that the company sacked 250 employees working at a Waterloo, Ontario, product-testing facility this past Tuesday.

“These employees were part of the New Product Testing Facility, a department that supports BlackBerry’s manufacturing and R&D efforts,” spokesman Alex Kinsella said. “This is part of the next stage of our turnaround plan to increase efficiencies and scale our company correctly for new opportunities in mobile computing.”

News of the layoffs follows a dismal first-quarter earnings report from BlackBerry, whose new BlackBerry 10 smartphones aren’t gaining nearly the traction needed to pull the company out of the mud. BlackBerry employed about 12,000 workers as of March, following job cuts of about 5,000 last year.