The Netherlands-based TomTom has said it will reduce 10% of its workforce and reorganise its R &D team.
The navigation equirpment maker said it will cut 457 jobs, of which 255 will be redundancies. The company is feeling the heat of the fall in sales of personal navigation devices, owing to competition from free navigation and other such services on smartphones.
It said, "The remainder will be achieved through attrition. A restructuring charge of €14m will be booked in Q4 2011 in relation to the redundancies and rationalisation of office space."
According to the company, most of the layoffs will be in administrative and marketing positions.
It will allocate a larger proportion of R&D budgets to higher growth areas. The R&D will now be spread over a variety of departments, including maps traffic, navigation, automotive systems, portable navigation devices, fleet services, fitness, mobile, points of interest and speedcams, the company stated.
