Nokia-Siemens Axing 17,000 Positions 87
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Unknown Lamer
from the competition-is-tough dept.
from the competition-is-tough dept.
alphadogg writes with troubling news for the network hardware joint-venture between Nokia and Siemens. Quoting the article: "Struggling network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks is planning to cut 17,000 jobs worldwide, as it aims to cut $1.35 billion from its costs by the end of 2013, the company said Wednesday. About 23% of the company's 74,000 employees will be laid off. The 4 1/2-year-old joint venture between Nokia and Siemens has been struggling to compete with Swedish Ericsson and Chinese vendor Huawei. Parent company Nokia's ongoing problems have made Nokia Siemens' situation even more difficult."
Re:Qt? (Score:3, Informative)
Nokia Siemens Networks has nothing to do with QT which seems to be the future of Nokia low end phones.
Re:Where will most of the jobs be cut? (Score:5, Informative)
Hi, European NSN employee here. The company is selling or putting into "permanent maintenance mode" basically all of its R&D business units with the exception of CDMA/LTE Mobile Broadband unit. This means that Packet Networks (Carrier Ethernet + MPLS), Optical Networks and Microwave Transport are being cut. Hopefully the B.U. will be sold (it already happened with Microwave Transport) and the engineers won'tl be fired.
At the cost of sounding vendicative and resented (I confess, I am, a little bit), let me say that NSN has been a complete mess since day 1 (april 2007). We have been struggling from day one with bad management, bad planning, bad product line definition, bad choices, millions and millions of money wasted with idiotic things, while headcount in Europe continously got less and less (and India and China grew) to be more competitive with Huawei, Ericcson, etc... And even in all of that, we did some excellent products.
However NSN grew from 60000 (Nokia Networks + Siemens Networks merge) to 74000 with Motorola Networks acquisition *even if right after 1 month from the merge they started headcount reduction and voluntary leave plans*. We have been struggling psychologically with that for 4 years. It seems that it will be over soon.
Re:People are not the largest cost of doing busine (Score:4, Informative)
They 'laid off' everyone with zero notice and pretty much told to go home.
The way they terminated those employees is what rankled. They got the standard Nokia severance.
I will bite. As a Nokia Employee for the last 4 years("the hard years"), I can tell you that getting laid off from Nokia is a good deal.
I would prefer to be laid off immediately with an amazing severance. Being told that you are being let go and hanging around is a real morale killer for yourself and the remaining workers.
A friend in that group went on to make more money, less bureaucracy, better health care and much better job security and they didn't have to get any windows phone shit on them.
Nice for him(or they?). I'm sure having Nokia on his resume helped him land that job. I'm not quite sure I understand though why this is relevant since Nokia pays well, has very good healthcare and the job security was great until the company fell on hard times. Business is a competition and that secure job might not be so pretty in a few years.
Re:People are not the largest cost of doing busine (Score:5, Informative)
You're a complete moron.
1) Taxes were much, much higher in the 50s than there are now. Go look it up. The 1% paid 90+%.
2) With all the spending on the Cold War, there's no way the USG was much smaller as a percentage of GDP than now.
3) The EPA is there to prevent pollution from making this place like China. I guess you'd prefer living in Beijing where you need to wear a respirator when you're outside?
4) The Fed has been around since the early 20th century. If you have a complaint with them, but you're saying the 50s were great, then you're obviously a complete idiot as nothing has changed since then WRT the Fed.
5) Congress has been able to pass new taxes since Congress was invented, you moron.
Re:Where will most of the jobs be cut? (Score:3, Informative)
Other EU employee here. Sorry, but not all is going maintenance, some strategic business lines are getting extra fund and attention. Same for some countries. Additionally, we finally acknowledge who are our customers (telcos) and who is not (almost everyone else).
Where most of the cuts are is where the product lines are. All these things we will stop developing will mean headcount reduction. For what I know, in europe, it means portugal, finland, germany, poland. Pretty sure India will suffer as well. No idea about other countries. We can expect voluntary packages almost everywhere
NSN gave a chance to many products, and was extremely patient with some that never lived to expectations. My little finger is telling me that there will be more OEM agreements in the near future so that we keep a consistent offering. I never had to complain too much about that. We often manage to add value to the base product with some productized adapters, allowing faster and safer delivery. And this at a marginal cost.
Finally, there has clearly been struggles, poor decisions, and our management structure is changing and will changes again. But NSN has significant achievements, for example: it is hosting networks representing 650+ Mio users, has the strongest mobile broadband offering, and a (finally) good delivery team when it comes to custom services