Troubled mobile phone maker Motorola has cut 4,000 jobs as part of its reorganisation under new owner. Motorola Mobility once owned the world is now cutting a fifth of its staff and will close a third of its 94 worldwide offices. According to the New York Times more than two-thirds of the job losses will come outside the US.

The company now plans to build high-end phones with sensors to detect people's entry into rooms, longer-lived batteries, higher-quality cameras and hiring AI experts. Google completed its $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility (MMI) in May, and appointed its own Dennis Woodside to run the company.

Motorola tried to recover by adopting Google's Android software for its smartphones early on but its handset division has lost money in 14 of the past 16 quarters. It looks like Motorola will retrenching to the US, and will stop competing in unprofitable markets.  It is also stopping offering low-end phones, to concentrate instead on a few phones rather than 27 it presently markets.

Woodside has embarked on a top-down shakeup in which 40 percon of MMI's former vice-presidents have been fired. He told the NYT that he wants to make MMI's phones cool again, and is setting up an "advanced technology" group, headed by Regina Dugan from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).