A substantial shake up at Nokia has been a long time coming, and now the Finnish phone giant’s executive team is kicking its new business plan into gear. Nokia today announced that 4,000 jobs will go, and a further 3,000 staff will see their services transferred to a new employer.
In a bid to cut operating expenses by €1bn (£888m), Nokia has announced it will reduce its workforce, by 4,000 before the end of 2012, with the most layoffs expected in Denmark, UK, and the company’s home turf of Finland.
In addition, Nokia is transferring 3,000 of its staff, responsible for the company’s axed Symbian operating system, before 2012 to Accenture – that’s right, the consultancy firm. They’ll continue to work on Symbian to begin with, and over time Nokia and Accenture will “seek opportunities to retrain and redeploy transitioned employees”.
Whether they’ll be retrained to make Windows Phone 7 apps remains to be seen, but Nokia for its part says that it “intends to ramp up its capacity for the development of Nokia smartphones based on the Windows Phone platform”.
Are you sorry to see Symbian outsourced, and essentially euthanised? Let us know in the comments.
