Things have suddenly gone from bad to worse at Sonos with the Company laying off 200 people today ahead of their last quarter financials.
Speculation has it that the US Audio Company could move back to a distribution model in Australia in an effort to cut costs.
Currently Melbourne based Westan is their distributor for the specialist audio channel.
Early this morning staff started getting pink slips with the latest sacking of 200 people coming six months after another 100 were let go.
Serious questions are now being asked as to whether Sonos can survive, after their latest app debacle, the failure of their new Ace headphones to gain traction in the market and the fact that their only future product appears to be an overpriced streaming box which is tipped to have a retail price in the USA of over A$600.
A lot of the problems at the Company have been sheeted back to sacked CEO Patrick Spence who has been described as a “Woke ineffective leader”.
“Everybody had to say yes to his ideas” one former staff member told ChannelNews at CES.
The shock sackings came in the form of a letter to employees from interim CEO Tom Conrad.
He said, “One thing I’ve observed firsthand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,”
“So, across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.”
The big question now is whether is able to operate as a thinner leaner Company or is the brand irreparable.
Sonos is scheduled to report its latest quarterly earnings on Thursday afternoon US time, Friday morning in Australia.
In Australia, the business is facing falling demand for its products with the brand badly tarnished and specialist installers now moving to alternative products.
According to the Verge, Conrad has pledged to continue improving the mobile app after the company carelessly released a major overhaul of the software back in May — well before it was actually ready for Sono’s customers.
It appears that a work from home culture and a woke attitude by management is now costing the business dearly.
During the past six months Sonos has desperately been trying to fix the mess that management got themselves into with staff now paying the price for the Companies past culture, sloppy management, and above poor product releases.
ChannelNews understands that Sonos is set to split the business up into groups spanning hardware, software, design, quality, and operations.
“We are moving away from dedicated business units devoted to individual product categories,” Conrad wrote.
“Being smaller and more focused will require us to do a much better job of prioritizing our work — lately we’ve let too many projects run under a cloud of half-commitment. We’re going to fix this too,” he added.
