The latest tech company to announce layoffs is speaker-maker Sonos. It is reducing its workforce by 7% – around 130 people.
Tag: Sonos
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Google ordered to pay Sonos $32.5m over smart-speaker patent
Sonos has won a partial victory in one aspect of its long-running legal battle with Google over smart-speaker patents.
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Sonos doubles down on spatial audio with its latest speaker
Sonos has unveiled its latest speakers, and spatial audio is a key focus for the company in 2023 as its CEO has made clear.
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Sonos enlists Deezer to power its Sonos Radio streaming services
Sonos launched its ad-supported Sonos Radio streaming service in April 2020, and followed it up with a subscription tier.
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Sonos and Google’s legal battle gets a couple more lawsuits
It’s more than two and a half years since Sonos first sued Google alleging patent infringement, but the legal battle shows no signs of cooling down.
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Sonos is preparing to launch its own voice assistant
Voice assistants have been at the heart of Sonos’s arguments with Google and Amazon in recent years.
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Sonos revenues grew 90% year-on-year in first quarter of 2021
Audio hardware firm Sonos published its latest financial results yesterday, and they were good ones. The company’s revenues grew by 90% year-on-year to $332.9m in Q1 (its fiscal Q2), helping it to […]
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Sonos Radio is the third most-streamed service on its devices
The latest musicians to curate channels on Sonos Radio were announced yesterday: D’Angelo, FKA Twigs, Björk and the Chemical Brothers are the latest artists to turn DJ for the hardware […]
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Sonos goes HD with subscription-based radio service
Sonos is kicking its streaming ambitions up a notch, with the launch of a subscription-based radio service called Sonos Radio HD.
Available in the US and UK, it costs $7.99 / £7.99 a month, and promises ‘high-fidelity audio’ of the Sonos Sound System radio station. There will also be exclusive artist-curated stations (Dolly Parton being the first) and a range of genre and activity-based stations that won’t be available on the existing, ad-supported Sonos Radio service that launched in April this year.
This is an extension of Sonos’s partnership with Napster – Sonos Radio HD is a ‘Powered by Napster’ service – but there’s another partner involved that’s interesting. Startup Super Hi-Fi’s technology is being used across the free and paid tiers of Sonos Radio, and heralds the company’s rebranding of its AI-powered tech as a package called ‘Conductor’.
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Sonos and Google legal battle heats up with new patent lawsuit
Sonos is really sticking it to Google this year. It sued the company alleging patent infringement in January, then its CEO testified before a US antitrust subcommittee about what he saw as ‘market distortion’ activities by Google (and Amazon) with their smart speakers.
Now the battle is moving into a new round, with Sonos filing another patent infringement lawsuit against Google focused on five more of its wireless audio patents.
“We think it’s important to show the depth and breadth of Google’s copying,” Sonos chief legal officer Eddie Lazarus told The Verge.
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Sonos says its business held up despite Covid-19 impact
Audio firm Sonos saw its revenues drop by 4% year-on-year during the second quarter of 2020 (its fiscal Q3), but the company sees that as a good performance given the shutdown of many physical retailers due to Covid-19 lockdown measures.
Sonos managed to grow its direct-to-consumer (i.e. products sold from its website) revenues by 299% year-on-year to almost make up for the physical retail issues, and in the US and UK saw its total sales actually grow by 4% and 13% respectively as a result.
Sonos had already announced plans to lay off 12% of its staff and close several offices as a result of the pandemic – measures which it now says will save it around $7.5m next quarter.
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Sonos to lay off 12% of staff due to Covid-19 pandemic
Connected audio firm Sonos is the latest company to announced plans for layoffs as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The Company initiated a plan on June 23, 2020 to eliminate approximately 12% of its global headcount. In addition, the Company is closing its New York retail store and six satellite offices,” revealed Sonos in a regulatory filing yesterday.
The last time Sonos revealed a headcount figure, for the end of September 2019, it had 1,446 full-time employees, so the layoffs are likely to be at least 173 staff.