Nokia to cut thousands of jobs, outsource Symbian OS

Jos

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Nokia has announced it will be cutting 7,000 jobs worldwide as part of a major restructuring plan as the company phases out Symbian and focuses on Microsoft's Windows Phone. The good news is that the 3,000 employees Nokia had working on Symbian will continue their jobs at consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture, which is now in charge of its development, but a further 4,000 will have to face what CEO Stephen Elop called a difficult reality and head home.

The bulk of the cuts are taking place in Denmark, Finland and UK. Nokia will try to cushion the blow for those affected and also mentioned the possibility of long-term re-employment for talented workers. Personnel reductions will occur in phases until the end of 2012, linked to the rollout of Nokia's planned product and services portfolio, and all employees affected by the reduction plans can stay on the Nokia payroll until the end of this year.

Nokia also said it would consolidate its research and product development sites, "so that each site has a clear role and mission". All in all the restructuring plan is expected to reduce operating expenses for devices and services by 1 billion euros, or $1.46 billion, for 2013 compared to 2010.

The measures are part of Nokia's new strategy to use Microsoft's Windows Phone platform software in a new line of handsets and regain market share in the smartphone sector. Although the Finnish company is still the world's largest phone maker by volume, it has seen its market share fall sharply over the past few years to the likes of Apple's iPhone and a raft of devices powered by Google's Android operating system.

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Yeah,unfortunately a difficult reality for the employees who had no part in Elop's failure to handle and survive the competition.
 
I dont think its Elop's doing that Nokia found itself in such dire situation, the failure lies in the fact that Nokia had failed to innovate/compete with rivals when the newer mobile OS & touchscreens start getting popular with smarphones. Irony is Nokia has the best screen anyone can offer for now (i.e. CBCD) but their OS (i.e. Symbian) was simply a relic of the past which they were unable to modernize. Unfortunately lack of leadership and direction during this period is what which has resulted in this.
 
QFT.
Nokia has been digging the hole since a while. It's only now that we're seeing the results.
 
Sym OS was a great OS in terms of battery life and making simple phone calls. It's UI was terrible, but I have my ipod for music and console for games...
 
Nokia is getting beat-up on several fronts.

Nokia is, of course, well known for their cell phones. But they also spent over $8 billion dollars several years ago to buy Navteq - the GPS Navigiation map and real-time traffic provider. But after Nokia bought Navteq, Google started beating them both up by expanding into the cell phone market with Android and their own GPS location services and mapping data.


btw.. Which i think is one of the real reasons for Nokia and Microsoft to become strategic partners lest Google demolish them both in Cell Phones and cell phone OS, providing GPS maps and locations services, etc.

Some more info / related articles for the fyi...

 
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