Nokia may be doing surprisingly not-badly at the moment, but that tentative journey back to profitability is partly down to cutting down on operational costs. And here comes more of that: the handset maker has just announced the latest tranche of job cuts.
The affected posts are all in IT – 300 jobs are being cut outright, and up to 820 employees will be transferred to HCL Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services. Most of those affected are in Nokia’s home country of Finland, although the company is being pretty vague about the precise number. This is to be expected, due to the imminent consultation period.
It’s important to note that these are not entirely new job cuts: Nokia said back in June 2012 that it would do away with around 10,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2013, and these are the last to go as part of that total in Finland. According to a Nokia spokesman, at the end of last month Nokia still had around 5,900 employees in Finland, excluding those working for Nokia Siemens Networks.
Those who are being made redundant rather than outsourced will be offered support through the Bridge program, a scheme designed to help ex-Nokians establish new startups. The most notable product of this program – at least so far – is Jolla, the company that’s trying to revive the largely abandoned MeeGo platform with its Sailfish OS. Of course, that’s an engineering play, so it will be interesting to see what potential spinoffs come out of Nokia’s IT operations.
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