Sony Ericsson has confirmed to its employees that it will close its current US headquarters/R&D center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and shut satellite offices in San Diego, California; Chennai, India; Kista, Sweden and Seattle, Washington as a result of its ongoing international restructuring effort which is seeking to cut 2,000 jobs in the latest round.
Ancillary facilities in Miami will also be closed, with the US headquarters moving to Atlanta, Georgia and what is left of the R&D division moving from Research Triangle Park to offices in Redwood Shores, California.
The job cuts are being conducted in several stages with new teams being formed to deal with the new logistics presented by the transition, with Sony Ericsson offering severance packages to qualified employees.
The closure of the Research Triangle Park Facility marks the end of an era for Sony Ericsson in the US, as the facility was home to the joint venture’s US headquarters and the former CDMA R&D team responsible for the T608, the last CDMA handset developed by the company in 2003 before the team was dissolved in the same year by the global office in Sweden to focus exclusively on GSM worldwide and confinining CDMA development to Japan.
I once visited their San Diego facility… smaller than I had expected.
The T608 was the first cellphone I ever had fun with.
Productive, though the battery life was poor.
Haha, I remember visiting this site when it was T608info.com and all I wanted in life was a Bluetooth capable phone on Sprint. Now I have a Pre and have never used BT on it.
[…] ended all future US CDMA handset development after its release and gutted the US CDMA R&D team previously located at the venture’s former US base at Research Triangle Park in North […]