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Nokia To Cut 10,000 Jobs and Close 3 Facilities
parallel_prankster writes "NY Times reports that Nokia said on Thursday it would slash 10,000 jobs, or 19 percent of its work force, by the end of 2013 as part of an emergency overhaul that includes closing research centers and a factory in Germany, Canada and Finland, and the departures of three senior executives. The company also warned investors its loss was likely to be greater in the second quarter, which ends June 30, than it was in the first, and that the negative effects of its transition to a Windows-based smartphone business would continue into the third quarter. Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, posted a loss of €929 million, or $1.2 billion, in the first quarter as sales plummeted 29 percent. Once the undisputed global leader in the mobile phone business, Nokia has been outcompeted by Apple, as well as by Samsung and other makers of handsets running Google's Android operating system." (Here's another source, if you're hit by the NYT paywall, and the company's own positive spin.)
A lot of Apple fans and MS haters may be tempted to cheer, but the loss of 10,000 jobs in this economy means 10,000 families whose lives will been up-ended and that sucks no matter what phone you're rooting for.
And what's more, according to the article, a third of these job losses will come from Finland, with more in Germany and Canada. Decent western factory jobs seem to be going the way of the Dodo bird. Are there any phones still actually being manufactured in the first world? Even if Nokia recovers, what are the odds that those jobs won't reappear in Finland, but in China?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
If only they had built on the success of the N9 and its predecessors instead of selling their soul to M$...
Another 10,000 jobs lost, they're going down!!! Oh wait that says Nokia up there. Oops.
Whaaaaat?!?! Really? This is a tremendously unexpected turn of events that nobody outside of your boardroom dealings would have EVER suspected!
Nokia always made the best hardware. All they had to do was make an Android phone and they would have been set.
This ranks right up there with the other colossal commercial blunders (Netflix, GM/Chevy, Burger King's evil king, etc).
With this kind of competition. We won't have no electronics manufacturers soon.
Microsoft should do a 2 for 1 purchase of Nokia and Rim, then finally they'll be able to make a superior phone that is constructed tough as nails while also having a solid keyboard and touchscreen.
Stephen Elop - The Trojan Horse of modern era.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, and Google IP lawyers are circling to fight over the carcass (Patent Portfolio) of Nokia.
Nokia makes crap phones that no one wants to buy. They also make incredibly popular low cost phones that sell millions in the developing world. Unfortunately, none of these operations are profitable.
Pretty simple math. No matter how big you are, if you cant keep up with changing times, you go away.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's a shame to see Nokia falling apart. It was not long ago that they had the very promising n900. I was all ready to buy one of those until I found out that it wasn't available on my carrier of choice, and in fact the only carriers it was available on in my area were the ones with the poorest coverage.
a factory in Germany, Canada and Finland
That's some factory--Nokia must have invented some kind of trans-dimensional technology. Surely that's worth a few bucks to someone?
Nokia was working on another Linux based operating system. This is now stopped.
More insight into how the board of Nokia is being stacked with Microsoft cronies.
Another round or two like this and the company will be all executives, no workers. That should help get them going in the right direction.
CEO and board members make a bad decision, the workers at the bottom end up paying for it.
Best of luck to those being let go.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
(Here's another source, if you're hit by the NYT paywall, and the company's own positive spin.)
what about slashdots spin effect?
This is what the aircraft safety people call "controlled flight into terrain" when one flies a plane into the ground.
Elop is one hell of a pilot.
--
BMO
When Apple first announced the iPhone, Jobs said in an interview that he would be happy if the iPhone captured 3% of the global smartphone market. Mind you, at the time, the Blackberry and the Treo were pretty much the only smartphones that existed.
Nokia was at the time, the biggest provider of any type phones and Apple believed that they had no chance to compete in that market, especially since Nokia was making phones that cost a mere $20 after being subsidized by the carrier.
So, how did Apple, which started with a very meager outlook for sales, completely destroy not one, but at least two major cell-phone makers (RIM and Nokia)? Both of these companies are mere shells of what they once were, and Apple is stronger than ever.
How is Apple one of the biggest companies on the planet, making what are essentially digital "toys"? Very few people actually *need* a smartphone, but apparently, and even Apple didn't forsee this, people *want* a single device that can really do it all.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The gist of it being that Windows isn't working, and Elop is killing any possible "plan B" for the company.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The fall of giants is tough. Nokias fall sounds like SGIs fall where project Fahrenheit sucked the last remaining useful IP out of the company before SGI went Jurrasic Park. Losing the R&D labs will mean that the next generation of phone-developers will not speak Finnish. Hey.. its that path they chose. What goes around comes around.
When Nokia made a deal with Microsoft, I didn't see any sense, except that:
1) Microsoft is well perceived in China,
2) Nokia is well perceived in China,
Nokia thought they would look good in the emerging market. However, they forgot that China makes only 1.3 billion people. Maybe they will win market in China, but they will lose market in the world. What is more 1.3 billion or 5.7 billion? Wrong decision.
In our quest for purity, we are asked to don a red or a blue cap which is supposed to align to socialist-leaning (blue) against capitalist-leaning (red) doctrines, but of late, not combine the two. Its time to realize that any successful society will need to embrace elements of both socialism and capitalism to be remain sovereign. Get that Mitt? Get that Barack?
No that was the assessment of Wall Street Investors after the announcement of Nokia's deal with Microsoft. Their assessment was correct. You're just an ass.
And then screw it up unto death, like everything else.
Everybody here is always talking about the Microsoft deal or how good was the hardware Nokia made.
But something that is never mentioned is how Nokia closed a digital store that because of their DRM implementation, denied customers of their legitimate purchases.
These are the kind of things that usually causes boycotts, for example a few guys get the message that Rock Band will stop working on the iPhone, and everybody in the world is talking about it. Nokia cut access to 52 games, and nobody cared. Well, I lost 21 purchases that day so I care.
Obviously if nobody cared for what Nokia did, that only could mean that they didn't had a big following. I was a Nokia fan, but now I won't give them a cent.
For me Nokia didn't had a future no matter what choice of operating system they took.
You may be right, but Nokia still had a fat chance of comeback with MeeGo, as already proved by Nokia N9 (I own one, and I easily claim it to be better than most, if not all, of the current smartphones due to its intuitive Swipe UI). Who was saying no to building Windows smartphones? But Elop apparently wasn't satisfied with only that. He had to kill the burning platform (Symbian) as well as the blooming platform (MeeGo). That is what has pushed Nokia off the cliff, IMO. I may seem to blame Microsoft (I actually do it inside my mind, though, having been a genuine Nokia fan since I became aware of phones), but the fact still stands that Elop cruelly slaughtered any remaining chances that Nokia had, with or without Microsoft behind him.
No it's not editorial spin. The NY Times appears to quote Nokia: "The company also warned investors that its loss was likely to be greater in the second quarter, which ends June 30, than it was in the first, and that the negative effects of its transition to a Windows-based smartphone business would continue into the third quarter."
...Paging Mr. Rick Belluzzo...Mr. Elop on line one...
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=207293
Stephen Elop's decisions as Nokia CEO indicate that he is placing the well-being of another company (Microsoft) over the well-being of the company he's supposed to represent. The result is the $1.2 billion quarterly loss mentioned in the original post. This loss is, in large part, a result of Elop's breach of his fiduciary duty to Nokia. Why haven't the shareholders sued him?
Who can die first?
Cheap phone - MS + Android = Win.
Only MS probably has some sort of no-Android clause attached to their money.
This is a tough slog today, but just keep repeating these bullet points:
* Elop has done nothing wrong
* Nokia was already heading for a train wreck before MSFT ever got involved with them so it is not Microsoft's fault at all, in any way, shape, or form.
* Windows Phone will be a success because IDC says so
* There is a strong rumour that there will be a government bailout in Finland but we can't say from whom or give any facts to substantiate that
* Elop has done nothing wrong
* It is all Nokia's fault
* Losing a few thousand Finn, Canadian, and German mobile phone R&D folks will improve our R&D efforts worldwide
* Partnering with Microsoft is a tremendous opportunity if only the other companies would meet the same standard of excellence and do their part.
* Elop has done nothing wrong
In the biggest smart phone markets, except for a few strange people like us, it is carriers not end users that buy phones. They want to offer contracts with the best buzzword compliance at the lowest cost and the biggest opportunity to restrict users so they won't use up all their bandwidth allowances. "OS-agnostic" isn't going to appear on a carrier site near you, whereas "Built-in Facebook" and "12MP camera" will.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The People's flag is deepest red
It shrouded oft our martyred dead
Though cowards scoff and traitors sneer
We'll keep the red flag flying here.
For a capitalist piss-take to the same tune (Tannenbaum)
The working class can kiss my ass
I've got the foreman's job at last....
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You don't know what his contract says. If it says in the small print "Get Microsoft to buy all our shares" and the idiots didn't think of the best way to do that (make them worthless) then they have nothing to sue about. A lot of bonkers management decisions make perfect sense - if you know what they were contracted to do.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Nokia lowered their forecast due to "increased competition". Isn't that just a backwards way of saying "our inability to compete"? Other companies are thriving (or at least surviving) despite all this competition.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
I wouldn't exactly call "selling off the patent portfolio to Google" no possible "plan B." That route is only profitable if the proceeds of the sale don't have to be spent on workers' salaries. The layoffs are required so the spoils are entirely given to the investors.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I have been thinking this entire thing smells like Elops entire goal was to drive stock so low that Microsoft can buyout Nokia on the cheap and have their own cell phone manufacturing division, ala Apple and now Google.
Nokia's seems to be to serve as a warning to others.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The people at Redmond had this planned from the beginning and the greedy selfish board of Nokia didn't see this coming. Elop's job was to renovate Nokia to a shadow of its former glory, to lower its market value enough for Microsoft to just grab and eat it like a little part of breakfast. There will be no more manufacturing jobs in "expensive" Finland, just what the greedy people in Redmond do not want. Maximize profits. What I would like to see here is something that the people at Microsoft would not expect.. ..if one of the others, the Big Ones, that still perhaps conduct "ethically", would go ahead and purchase Nokia in front of Microsoft..
There is no such statement in the nokia press release.
Microsoft's business is selling mediocrity using an unfair virtual monopoly, in my opinion. Nokia management must have little ability if they didn't know that.
This looks like the start of the extinguish phase of Microsoft's plan.
As a Finn I am really fucking pissed off at Elop and the Nokia board who let this happen.
Ever since they bought Trolltech, anything that doesn't envolve "build all software around Qt" doesn't make sense to me, from a managerial perspective.
Maintaining some or one previous platform for phones makes sense, but anything going forward that doesn't envolve Qt implies duplication of resources and waste.
Naturally, embracing Linux in full and KDE is, imo, obvious.
>
No Windows phone for ONE YEAR
This is a bit optimistic... Nokia still has NO WINDOWS PHONE to compete with. The current models have an OS that Microsoft is publicly stating is not quite there yet, and current phones will NOT be upgradeable to the "good", new version that is coming real soon now. So if you buy a Nokia phone, you are getting something with no future in 6 months, or a year, or ???
Wait, this is the company running ads claiming all smartphones up to this point have been beta tests?
oh wow.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Just another step in the plan to screw Nokia the same way they did Sendo. Nokia is so fucking stupid for trusting Microsoft, after all history repeats its self.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The Nokia strategy of we're competing against Apple/Google makes no sense. They aren't. They are competing against Samsung and HTC... So even if the windows phone took off. Samsung and HTC would still be there.
It's pretty clear that the strategy isn't a Nokia strategy, it's a Microsoft strategy. Microsoft know that the desktop is dead and they know that they have to get into the mobile space or they will be dead too.
It's just a shame the Nokia board were such suckers. I can't help notice that the Nokia shareholders are not as impressed by the Elop effect as Balmer might be.
Nokia passed at the chance to use Android because they didn't want to be "just another Android maker", and instead basically became "just another WP7 maker", I mean, you can say whatever you want about the Nokia MS deal but at the end of the day MS will discard the Nokia carcass once they're done sucking whatever's left out of it.
Nokia had nothing to lose by betting on both platforms.
If Microsoft buy Nokia, the shareholders will have been defrauded of their investments by the CEO of the company.
This should mean prison time.
Using http://www.arrak.fi/en/ag with "Stephen Elop",
we finally find the Deep Finnish Truth:
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hopples teen pole stephen
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Whatever is worth something can be trickled out to Microsoft while Nokia is still standing. Someone presenting a defence could say there's nothing illegal with Elop reluctantly laying people off and kind heartedly recommending the best of them to his former colleages at Microsoft.
Anyway, who does the time? The board that brought him in are complicit in the deliberate destruction of the company.