Nokia To Axe 10,000 Jobs Worldwide

Nokia provided bad news on the jobs front after it confirmed it will slash 10,000 jobs worldwide over the next two years.

The move is part of a cost cutting exercise that should end up costing the Finnish networking giant approximately 600 million euros ($715 million), Reuters reported.

Nokia is carrying out the cuts in an effort to invest more in its research capabilities, as it seeks to improve its 5G credentials against the likes of Huawei and Ericsson.

Latest cuts

According to Reuters, when chief executive Pekka Lundmark was appointed last year, he undertook a number of changes to help restore Nokia’s position in the 5G market.

Lundmark announced a new strategy in October 2020, under which Nokia will have four business groups. He said the firm would “do whatever it takes” to take the lead in 5G.

And this means that 10,000 jobs will go over the next two years, from Nokia’s total of 90,000 staff worldwide.

It is reported that nearly 100 jobs in the UK are at risk of being axed.

“Decisions that may have a potential impact on our employees are never taken lightly,” Lundmark reportedly said in a statement. “My priority is to ensure that everyone impacted is supported through this process.”

“These plans are global and likely to affect most countries,” a Nokia representative was quoted by Reuters as saying. “In Europe, we have only just informed local works councils and expect the consultation processes to start shortly, where applicable.”

France, where Nokia cut more than a thousand jobs last year, was excluded from the current restructuring, Reuters reported.

Job losses

It is no secret that Nokia has cut tens of thousands of jobs over the past decade, as the Finnish giant’s domination of the mobile handset market went spectacularly wrong.

Up until around 2009/2010, Nokia had been the leading mobile and smartphone maker in the world. But it was comprehensively outflanked by touchscreen devices such as the Apple iPhone that outclassed the Symbian-based handsets being sold by the Finnish giant.

Its decision then to pin its colours to the Windows Phone operating system from Microsoft eventually confirmed its demise in the mobile handset sector.

Instead Nokia focused on networking and in 2016 it finally purchased French telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6bn euros.

That gave the combined entity a global workforce of 114,000, but staffing levels are now down at 90,000, with another 10,000 jobs expected to go on top of this.