“Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has announced it will shed 7,000 jobs from next year as part of a plan to refocus the company on smartphones,” BBC News reports.
“The firm said 4,000 jobs worldwide would be cut – including a total of 700 jobs from Nokia’s UK sites. Nokia will also transfer a further 3,000 employees to outsourcing and consultancy group Accenture, which will take over Nokia’s Symbian software,” The Beeb reports. “Nokia [recently] agreed to start using the Microsoft’s operating system on its smartphones instead of its own Symbian platform.”
Th Beeb reports, “Nokia hopes that the job cuts and restructuring will also help produce savings of 1bn euros for the firm by 2013. ‘With this new focus, we also will face reductions in our workforce,’ said Stephen Elop, Nokia president.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “HotinPlaya” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Apple overtakes Nokia as world’s largest vendor of mobile handsets by revenue – April 21, 2011
Microsoft’s Windows Phone ’07 U.S. launch was a dud; Nokia worried? – April 12, 2011
Apple makes roadkill of deer-in-the-headlights CEOs – April 1, 2011
Microsoft to pay Nokia over $1 billion to use Windows Phone ’07 – March 7, 2011
Analysts not impressed with Nokia’s incoming CEO Elop – September 10, 2010
Man that sucks, never like hearing about people losing their jobs.
Yes, but what really sucks is that management had their heads stuck in the sand for the last three years and didn’t give their underlings a fighting chance. But of course, management stays, and the underlings go.
Now Elop has jumped from a burning platform onto a burning ship.
Seems more like jumping from a pirate ship onto a cargo ship.
You’re doin’ a heckuva job, ‘loppie!
“The Microsoft,” eh? Like The Cracken? Certainly as destructive!
“The Microsoft”… ‘It’s a mythological creature… I can call it what I want!’
Like!
Microsoft are real – it’s just their products that are mythical
Nokia Disconnecting People
If investors overlook the potential issues with Nokia’s embrace of Microsoft’s OS, they will likely get very excited over the cost cutting. It would be ironically satisfying if the displaced employees formed their own companies and developed competitors which ended up more successful than Nokia.
Beleaguered Nokia is up 3.16% today while Apple is down a bit. Go figure!
So…they are going to concentrate on the smartphone, where every tech-head has the expectation that it will have to be better than the iPhone, and just let their bread-and-butter dumb handset market flounder? Sounds like a plan to me. ;P
It is too bad the employees are losing their jobs, but better to be unemployed in Finland than here.
Microsoft demolition job in progress. Nokia’s factories will be dusty car parks by the time Elop is finished.
I’m sure this is all due to global warming.
Nokia is clearing deadwood… setting the company up for a takeover by Microsoft.
There will be nothing left but deadwood by the time Microsoft takes over.
Seriously, that wouldn’t shock me.
MDN loves it’s B words.” Beleaguered” & “Blood Bath”. I do too.
Connocting poopie
http://www.engrish.com/2009/09/browntooth-enabled/
Nokia: When your ship is sinking, you don’t tie yourselves to another sinking ship, i.e. Microsoft.
When you get a Microsoft clone who learned his craft on the lap of Steve Ballmer you’ll tend to inherit qualities prized by bean counters and salesmen everywhere. The first job that Elop did was not to innovate and produce new products with laser-like focus but to cut costs and farm out software development to another company. Shades of Palm selling off Palm OS to Palm Source. Then of course instead of rallying the troops by cutting down product complexity he increases it by adopting Windows Phone 7 as an alternate OS layer to Symbian.
The biggest head scratcher of all – have you seen Nokia’s website lately? It’s got a gazillion different phone models each one slightly different from the other – a confusing array of possible choices that drowns the consumer in utter confusion. Apple keeps it simple – one phone model to choose from with customisation derived from software rather than hardware. The consumer doesn’t have to scratch his head wondering about choice but instead loads useful apps to make his phone fit his lifestyle.