October 20, 2023
Nokia is cutting up to 14,000 jobs amid a slowdown in the global economy and rising interest rates. The company reported a 20% drop in third-quarter sales and a 69% decline in profit.
CEO Pekka Lundmark said the job cuts are necessary to “adjust to market uncertainty and to secure our long-term profitability and competitiveness.” The cuts will come from all areas of the company, but the hardest-hit areas will be Mobile Networks, Cloud, Network Services, and corporate functions.
Lundmark also said the company is trying to increase the autonomy of the leadership in its business groups, so they can speed up decisions that affect their “distinctive” markets.
Lundmark said network infrastructure revenues shrank 14% in the third quarter, due to weaker spending on IP networks and fixed networks. Lundmark also said he noticed “some moderation in the pace of 5G deployment in India” in the third quarter, which meant that growth there was no longer enough to offset the slowdown in North America. Cloud and Network Services were down just 2% in the quarter.
Ericsson, Nokia’s Swedish rival, reported a 10% decline in third-quarter sales earlier this week, also citing customer uncertainty. Ericsson has already laid off 8,500 people this year, about 8% of its workforce.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.
