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Nokia-Siemens Axing 17,000 Positions
alphadogg writes with troubling news for the network hardware joint-venture between Nokia and Siemens. Quoting the article: "Struggling network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks is planning to cut 17,000 jobs worldwide, as it aims to cut $1.35 billion from its costs by the end of 2013, the company said Wednesday. About 23% of the company's 74,000 employees will be laid off. The 4 1/2-year-old joint venture between Nokia and Siemens has been struggling to compete with Swedish Ericsson and Chinese vendor Huawei. Parent company Nokia's ongoing problems have made Nokia Siemens' situation even more difficult."
Hi, European NSN employee here. The company is selling or putting into "permanent maintenance mode" basically all of its R&D business units with the exception of CDMA/LTE Mobile Broadband unit. This means that Packet Networks (Carrier Ethernet + MPLS), Optical Networks and Microwave Transport are being cut. Hopefully the B.U. will be sold (it already happened with Microwave Transport) and the engineers won'tl be fired.
At the cost of sounding vendicative and resented (I confess, I am, a little bit), let me say that NSN has been a complete mess since day 1 (april 2007). We have been struggling from day one with bad management, bad planning, bad product line definition, bad choices, millions and millions of money wasted with idiotic things, while headcount in Europe continously got less and less (and India and China grew) to be more competitive with Huawei, Ericcson, etc... And even in all of that, we did some excellent products.
However NSN grew from 60000 (Nokia Networks + Siemens Networks merge) to 74000 with Motorola Networks acquisition *even if right after 1 month from the merge they started headcount reduction and voluntary leave plans*. We have been struggling psychologically with that for 4 years. It seems that it will be over soon.