HELSINKI (AFP) -- Finland's Nokia, one of the world’s biggest mobile phone makers, announced Thursday that it planned to cut up to 10,000 jobs by the end of next year due to massive additional cost-savings measures.
“These planned reductions are a difficult consequence of the intended actions we believe we must take to ensure Nokia's long-term competitive strength,” company chief executive Stephen Elop said in a statement.
Nokia was earlier this year bumped from the world’s biggest mobile phone maker spot it had held for 14 years.
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Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia Oyj (Bloomberg) |
The company said it has been undergoing a major restructuring for more than a year would need to implement much bigger cost-saving measures than previously expected. It also announced a massive management reshuffle.
“In addition to the already achieved annualized run rate saving of approximately 700 million euros ($874 million) at the end of the first quarter of 2012, the company targets to implement approximately 1.6 billion of additional cost reductions by the end of 2013,” it said in a statement.
Nokia said it would continue to “closely assess the future of certain non-core assets,” and confirmed reports that it would sell its luxury mobile phone business Vertu to private equity firm EQT VI.
Vertu was established in 1998, on a concept of haute-couture mobile telephony. Its phones, which are typically adorned with diamonds and other gems, run on the Symbian operating system with prices starting at around 4,000 euros for the Constellation model.
Nokia has since early 2011 been restructuring and phasing out its Symbian smartphones in favor of a partnership with Microsoft. That alliance has produced a first line of Lumia smartphones.
Nokia is depending heavily on the new phones to help it survive in a rapidly changing landscape with RiM's Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone and handsets running Google's Android platform take growing bites out of its market share.
caption: Stephen Elop, chief executive officer of Nokia Oyj Bloomberg
