Despite the fact that the Nokia we used to know and love is no longer around, the Finnish firm is still very much alive and kicking. Since the sale of their handset business to Microsoft – which was itself recently sold to a subsidiary of China’s Foxconn – the Finnish brand has been focusing on their network technologies. It’s easy to forget that Nokia was not only the company we used to know and love because of their great devices, but also because of their approach to network technologies and the work that they put into create new technologies and infrastructure. Despite being an industry leader in this field, things aren’t all rosy for Nokia, and there’s a chance that the firm may need to cut many more jobs than they first wanted to.
As part of plans to reduce their overall spending by $1 Billion by 2018, job cuts were announced as being unavoidable, and while the figures that were banded around earlier in the year were much lower, it’s now thought that Nokia could cut around 15% of its global workforce. Risto Lehtilahti, a Union representative has told Reuters that “the global impact of this round would likely be around 10,000 to 15,000 jobs” which would make the larger figure 14% of Nokia’s global workforce of 104,000 employees. These higher figures are more than likely the result of the integration between Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent, which the former purchased last year. With a larger workforce comes bigger expenses, and if Nokia wants to cut down their spending, they will now also need to turn their attention to the Alcatel-Lucent workforce as well.
These job cuts, if these figures turn out to be accurate of course, could put Nokia in the firing line of French regulators as the Finnish firm had vowed not to cut French jobs for at least two years after they had bought the Franco-American Alcatel-Lucent. Different divisions of Nokia’s all over the world have experienced different signs that Nokia is looking to swing the axe, with Lisa Bolton from the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union saying that “They have cut 500, cut our (unionized) workforce in half, and we hope that’s all that is going to be taken away”. The CWA had noted that Nokia has been reducing the amount of US jobs in preparation for such a thing. With rumors of the Nokia smartphone name coming back, things could either start to go right for the Finnish firm or continue to go backwards.