SiRF to cut jobs, drop mobile TV in wake of GPS sales

Best known for its GPS chipsets, SiRF today said that mounting losses were forcing the company to both cut jobs and shed one of its newer businesses. The supplier to Garmin, TomTom, and several other major navigation device maker dropped its financial expectations for the first quarter of 2008 by about $10 million and explained that it would have to cut 7 percent of its total workforce and would shutter an office in the south end of San Francisco as well as a Stockholm, Sweden location.

The cuts are necessary as the orders for GPS devices as a whole are far lower than than expected in 2008, leaving the company without enough sales of its chipsets, according to SiRF.

The company also plans to axe its developing mobile TV business, which SiRF claims has been too slow in growing and so has been considered a money-losing prospect in the short term. Mobile TV tandards such as DVB-H only have one active carrier in Europe and have seen attempts at a second US provider delayed, with AT&T delaying its launch of a MediaFLO TV service for several weeks or more.

Filed under: industry
Other story tags: AT&T, GPS, MediaFLO, DVB-H, SiRF