IoT Solutions Provider - Telit Goes on Retrenchment Mode

As per sources, close to the company, Telit has laid-off about 100 employees from its India as well as US operations

In an effort to support heavy cost-cutting exercise - London based Internet of Things solutions provider Telit is engaged in a retrenchment activity and as a result, the company has recently laid-off about 100 employees at global level.

“Today, Telit is engaged in a heavy cost-cutting exercise. The fact is that today, the company is interested in saving operational costs and nothing else. Telit has laid off its workforce at its India and US operations – about 100 professionals have been laid off recently,” informed a source close to Telit on conditions of anonymity.

When contacted by TelecomDrive.com on these issues, Telit has refused to either confirm or deny this.

On the other hand, our source went on to explain that, “As a result of this cost-cutting - some of its core growth areas like APAC has also seen dramatic loss in performance. India, which is one of the fastest growing economies, has a staff of only 2 people managing sales in the whole country, which is nearly the size of Europe. No wonder the sales figure of India are low. The company is always cost cutting, there is no headcount to cover the entire length and breadth of a vast country like India and one is only worried about cost cutting. There is complete lack of strategy for the Indian market. While IoT is quite an established story in India, Telit has not been able to make its mark into India’s big government sector as well. We keep talking about targeting Smart Cities but as a company we have no inroads into the state governments to get big orders,” explained the source.

Also, the source confirmed to us that the company is expected to see growth in 2018 revenues as per its filing with the London stock exchange - the sources tell us that this growth in revenues is primarily fueled by heavy cost cutting measures forced upon its employees and global operations.

The company's customer service is also adversely getting affected because of lack of infrastructure and support. “This cost saving exercise is damaging the organization pretty badly, it is having its domino-effect on almost every aspect of Telit business. Today, there are many customers who are not satisfied with the way they receive service and support by Telit,” the source added.

It may be recalled that in February 2017, Telit agreed to acquire Silicon Valley-based GainSpan Corporation for $8 million. GainSpan (now a part of Telit) is a wireless connectivity solution provider that specializes in the design and development of ultra-low power Wi-Fi technology.

At the time of its acquisition, GainSpan had over 90 employees, mostly R&D and application and support engineers, spread across an R&D center in Bengaluru, India and San Jose, California.

Our source confirmed that Telit's R&D centre in Bengaluru which is primarily working on Wi-Fi technologies has also seen attrition at all levels.

According to the company’s website - Telit, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange has a total of 1070 employees spread across the globe.

Telit has denied to comment on this story, till the time of filing this report.