Nokia To Axe 800 Employees in Finland

Reuters is reporting that Finnish mobile manufacturing giant Nokia is to axe 800 employees in its home market, the personel will be part of the 1,800 worldwide job cuts it announced in October.

The STT news agency broke the news, citing labor sources close to the matter.

The company has been suffering poor sales in North America and has gradually found its lead in the smartphone operating system market cut by Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems. Senior executives at the company have resigned from their positions with Nokia desperately trying to stop its talent haemorrhaging from the corporation and moving to its competitors .

Nokia recently appointed ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop as its new CEO, an appointment which was seen to be the start of a major turning-point for the manufacturer, leading the company back into the markets it had previously failed to capture.

The announcement of 800 job losses will do nothing to stop many people believing Nokia has seen its best days, the company has declined to comment at this time so we are unable to find out the reasons behind the cuts.

Update: Nokia has issued a statement that explains the reasoning behind the cuts:

The cuts are a part of the plan to increase our competitiveness – we are simplifying our product creation, expanding the use of common tools and streamlining software development, among other things. According to the labor legislation in Finland , we started the negotiations about the planned reductions in October with personnel representatives, and now those negotiations have been concluded – that is the news item in this case. The max impact in Finland is 800 (as opposed to the 850 we originally announced), and we are offering people affected voluntary severance packages and will try to redeploy people into other positions as much as possible. We will only know how many reductions there will be after the process has been completed, and this takes some time. So the actual layoffs is likely to be much smaller than the 800, as we believe many people will choose the voluntary package and we also hope to be able to find new positions to a part of the affected group.