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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?
Whaaaaat?!?! Really? This is a tremendously unexpected turn of events that nobody outside of your boardroom dealings would have EVER suspected!
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.
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.
Would not happen. Instead they would buy the companies fire all the workers and replace them with MS party line type folks. You would get a phone that RRoD would be a known issue for years, and would be worse than any the two previous companies made before. NIH is a huge issue for MS.
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?
They're also getting rid of those popular low cost phones that have been selling in Africa and India. Elop is killing all possible ways to save Nokia and is actively ruining the company. Other analysts don't see Nokia returning to profitability devices in the foreseeable future either this year or next. There's nothing left to save. The pre-Microsoft Nokia is already dead and gone. There's nothing to rejoice about, it's just a fact.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
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.
How? By doing what they've done for 30 years - making hardware and software actually work together without massive end-user hassle. They don't invent ground breaking technologies (for the most part, there have been a few exceptions), but they make available technologies actually useable.
Turns out that there's a shedload of money in doing that.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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?
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."
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?
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."
Money is money. If the phones are profitable, then continue to pursue them while you move in another direction. Consider Samsung, they are the smartphone leader right now, shipping 38 million smartphones last quarter (compared to Apple's 31 million). They also shipped 48 million dumb phones during the same period. I don't hear anything from them about dumping their dumb phone business. It goes to show that you can be both a smart and dumb phone company.
This reminds me very much of the recent HP shortsightedness with their low margin computer business.
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.
It is now abundantly clear that Nokia needed to get on board with Android. Sure, they would likely end up with less than a majority share but their name recognition, distribution network, engineering and let's admit it, build quality, would ensure a solid, respectable share. Better than nothing, which is what they will have if they don't fire Elop.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
In the USA that is true, but Nokia sells most of it phones outside of USA where consumers pick the phones.
Canada only has ~70% market penetration, one of the lowest rates on earth, definitely low for a developed country.
Most of western Europe is 125-150%, US, AUS are ~100%, Russia is 150%, middle east is similar. South America and Indonesia, Japan, are mostly ~100%.
India and China are both at ~75%, which is a massive number on their own.
The numbers are active subscriptions, so If you have a personal mobile and one from work, you're at 200% personally... which is how you get >100% penetration.
Sent from my PDP-11