Nokia Cuts 7,000 Jobs

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Nokia just announced huge job cuts – 7,000 jobs in total, right across its internal divisions and spread all over the world. It’s the biggest single jobs layoff in the company’s history.

Offices will be closed (including one in the UK that was only recently refurbished at a cost of £8 million) and three thousand jobs connected with the Symbian mobile operating system transferred to consulting company Accenture.

What has brought this about? Apple, of course, and the runaway success not just of the iPhone, but of touch-screen smartphones generally. Nokia was unprepared for them in the mid-2000s, and struggled to catch up.

Even so, Nokia is still a huge company. The vast majority of cellphones sold all over the world are still the non-smart variety. Cheap, low-cost handsets that do voice calls and SMS messages and do both of them very well. Nokia still sells millions of these every year, and doesn’t need to worry about Apple invading their space with a low-cost phone. Perish the thought.

There’s that, and there’s the announcement earlier this year that Nokia would team up with Microsoft. One gets a shiny new operating system for its handsets, the other gets its operating system on to gazillions of shiny handsets. Something like that, anyway.

Even with help from mighty Microsoft, the damage has been done. Even with its ongoing massive sales of super-cheap, super-simple phones, Nokia is still in trouble. The sooner it can produce low-cost smartphones capable of giving the iPhone and the better Android phones a run for their money, the better.

(Via The Register)