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Ericsson Is Planning To Cut 25,000 Jobs in Brutal Response To Crisis, Report Says (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Multinational telecom operator Ericsson -- which carries 40% of the world's mobile traffic on its networks and is Sweden's second largest company by revenue -- reported another disappointing quarter last month.
As response, the troubled company's new CEO Borje Ekholm announced costs cuts of 10 billion SEK ($1,25 bn) per year. He did not say how many jobs were at stake. Now insider sources have provided details to Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), indicating that Ericsson's restructuring will be more brutal than expected. The Swedish newspaper reports that there are advanced plans to cut Ericsson's operations by 80-90 percent in some markets, and centralize several European markets. However, the 14,000 employee-strong Swedish work force is to stay intact -- at least all R&D engineers. "Right now, Ericsson is hiring engineers to repair the damage that earlier saving packages caused. It's crucial that most of all the Swedish R&D department remains somewhat protected. They are the ones who will come up with the new solutions that will drive sales in the long term," said a person with insight into the process. According to internal sources, up to 25,000 people may be affected by the restructuring program. The Swedish company currently employs 109,000 people across 110 offices around the world.
Ericsson is not a telecom operator, but a telecoms equipment company.
ericsson has a management problem , not an employee problem , i worked for them for 3 years , was originally hired as a full hire but they fucked me up in my contract mot making me a full employee , i.e treating me as a consultant but at the same salary as full hires and no socials being renewed at 3 months period , they ended up dismissing me when i asked they either titularise me or give me my consulting fees as an independent , i am a single parent and i told them straight off on the first phone calls that i am not interested in temp work and that medical insurances was mandatory . they chose to fuck me over and i have no issue in letting the world know . Ericsson is nowhere a select employer.
For research? No.
Swedish unions save there jobs the us office H1B's to cut costs.
The MBA classes that I have took, actually encouraged R&D and making a solid product. The problem is the misinterpretation of the statement that "A companies first priorities are to towards the shareholders" The person who had created that statement actually went on to expand and apologized for it. At the time of that statement a lot of companies were running their business to the grown with shareholder money and just pocketing the money, or putting the money not into the business but towards other causes they may feel they want to put it into. This wasn't meant as a statement to put short term gains over a long term plan, but to make sure the money used for the business is put towards the growth of the business, so the shareholders will be able get payback from their investments.
Often these decisions are also not from some Harvard MBA, but from accountants, who need to report quarterly, which cannot always get a direct correlation of money put into R&D and company profits.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Without collapsing? Either they've got some Amazing automation coming online or their gearing up for a buy out. Either way the employees are gonna get screwed.
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Uhm, I'm surprised they still have that many employees.
Ericsson was the victim of a huge amount of IP theft. It was obvious when a Chinese telecom equipment provider released a router a few years ago which looked exactly like an Ericsson router and behaved exactly the same way. Including all of the bugs and "features" for developer access to diagnostics. It took quite a while for them to react, and what they did to try and stop the theft was too little too late.
When developer cost is favored over security at every step of the process, well... they could have seen this coming.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
No worries, Sweden has plenty of "immigrants" to fill those positions!
So that instead of having to modify a cellphone to act as a detonator, they will be able to just bring up an app.
May be the secret to a Swedish companies success lies in very creative names like Ansglilja, Applaro, Klasen, Graslok Nunnerort with lots of double dots over O and tiny circles on top of A liberally sprinkled.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But cell phone providers (aka Telecomm oligopoly) are making so much money right now, that they don`t feel the pressure to buy new equipments or provide better services. They don't care. When they are ready to invest, Ericsson will be well positioned.
But...but...IP theft doesn't hurt anyone. At least that's what Slashdot tells us.
For research? No.
Actually there are. Higher education in Sweden used to be free for all, that led to a lot of students from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh (and others). They generally studied tech related subjects. On a swedish student visa you are allowed to work, so many found work that could be combined with the studies. Once the studies are over you either go back or as most opt, you try to get a work permit. Rules are you need an offer of employment valid for two years that pays at least 13000 sek/month (about 1600 usd). Do that twice and third time you get a permanent residency. What happend was that they couldn't find work related to their education under those conditions (it's the valid for two years part that is problematic and you can only have one employer so no temp work), but they could get an offer of employment from the menial work they did for extra money as a student. Many are now stuck in those positions as their education is slowly fading into obscurity.
Actually Ericsson has employees with work permits, however to get one you must have an offer of work with conditions that are not worse than the collective agreement or what's common on the swedish labour market. As Ericsson has a collective agreement they can not (easily at least) dump wages. As others have noted layoffs in Sweden is cheap and engineer salaries are lower than for example germany.
Telephone Sanitizers
(HHGTTG ref)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I mean, I get that Ericsson probably saw they need to get going if they want to be part of 5G and future telecom equipment rollouts....but I have NEVER heard a CEO, even of a technology company, acknowledge that they haven't spent enough on R&D. At least lately, R&D has always been a cost that had to be minimized in any way possible. Anything outside of a 3-month timeframe is completely off the table at most companies; it has to affect this quarter's numbers or it's totally invisible.
At least in big US corporations, I blame this on the MBA grooming cycle. MBAs are taught that they can manage anything using metrics and spreadsheets, and that they need no knowledge of the actual business processes they're managing...it's enough to be able to run the numbers. Add to this the fact that an MBA gets you an immediate management job at most companies, even if you've never done the work before or know anything about the company. And on top of that, the truly elite business schools graduate MBAs who haven't really had to work or get any real-world experience. It's Harvard MBA --> McKinsey --> VP job at a high-end McKinsey customer, with no stops in between. I've seen this happen in a couple of large companies - you get people who have no clue what's going on unless there's a dashboard telling them some metric is out of spec.
I wish more companies would admit mistakes like Ericsson is doing and try to focus on something other than the share price...but I'm not holding my breath!
"Right now, Ericsson is hiring engineers to repair the damage that earlier saving packages caused. It's crucial that most of all the Swedish R&D department remains somewhat protected. They are the ones who will come up with the new solutions that will drive sales in the long term,"
In other words, the last CEO was a typical MBA jackass who cut engineering/R&D as a short term cost savings measure, and now they are paying a huge price (~25% layoff based on 100k employees). It never ceases to amaze me how many CEOs view R&D as overhead, and cut those employees willy nilly and then laugh all the way to the bank when they pull the ripcord on their golden parachute in 5 years as the company tanks because they don't have any products to compete because they starved their pipeline to fatten the C-level executive bonuses. (A karmic law that will never be passed would be for management bonuses to be impounded for 5 years and distributed to any employees laid off for 5 years after the bonus is paid.)
The root cause of all this stupid is the practice of paying CEOs more than god in salary and bonuses for what amounts to a relatively simple job (look at the market, competition, position and guess where to go/what to do next). Regardless of what the CEOs might say, most larger, established companies would probably do better being guided by a simple algorithm that looks at maybe 15 key factors and then decides if the company should expand, how many new products to pursue etc. and then let market research and engineering feasiblity studies guide what products are selected using a Pugh study.
CEOs are fast becoming the emperor with no clothes and are in the same category as fund managers (hint: you are better off with an index fund, since fund managers are about as good as throwing darts at a wall). Companies need to come up with a similar, stable form of governance to an index fund.
Most real work is done by lower management, HR, sales, sales research, etc. "Vision" might be marketed by CEOs as some ineffable thing, but most companies would do a lot better long term hiring someone internally for $300k/year who knows WTF the company is in the business of doing.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like