Microsoft cutting 1850 jobs related to mobile phone sector
Microsoft has laid off hundreds of employees tied to its smartphone business, as the company finally exits the consumer phone market and attempts to streamline its worldwide mobile division (via The Verge).
Microsoft said it will continue to update and support its current Lumia smartphones as well as those of third-party manufacturers based on the Windows 10 platform, and plans to develop new devices.
Nadella also promised innovation in "cloud services across all mobile platforms". Microsoft announced 7,800 layoffs and claimed a loss of roughly $7.6 billion. Windows Phone's market share is still in decline and since absorbing Nokia's former employees, Microsoft has had a fair few rounds of job cuts.
Some in the industry have speculated that this could see the end of Microsoft's smartphone ambitions.
Around 1,850 jobs are set to be lost at Microsoft, in a move that will cost the company around $950 million (£648m), including $200 million (£136m) in severance pay-offs.
Some 1,350 jobs at Microsoft Mobile Oy in Finland will go, as well as up to 500 additional jobs globally, the company said.
These layoffs are apparently part of the final steps in the two year saga of the Microsoft acquisition of Nokia and its utter and complete failure as a business move. The company's previous chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, made the deal with the goal of transforming Microsoft, a company that was struggling to keep pace with the likes of Apple and Google in the mobile business.
The software-rich smartphones have already buried sales of Nokia's traditional mobile phones, which used to be a big player in this segment once.
It's been widely speculated Microsoft could build on the success of its convertible Surface tablets and leverage that product line to create a high-end Surface phone in the next year.
The actions associated with today's announcement are expected to be substantially complete by the end of the calendar year and fully completed by July 2017, the end of the company's next fiscal year.
Source: Microsoft cutting 1850 jobs related to mobile phone sector
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