SDM-2002001040 mission - SDM Certification - CARE (SDM_2002001040) Updated: 2023

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Nokia will slash up to 14,000 jobs in a major cost-cutting drive to address a “weaker” market environment, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The Finnish telecom giant, a major provider of 5G equipment that employs 86,000 people, announced the move as part of a wider restructuring that will lower its headcount to between 72,000 and 77,000.

The move will help the company reduce staffing expenses by 10% to 15%, and save at least €400 million ($421.4 million) in 2024 alone, the company projected.

Overall, it said the reductions are expected to trim Nokia’s costs by up to €1.2 billion (nearly $1.3 billion) cumulatively by the end of 2026. Nokia (NOK) said it would “act quickly” to make changes.

“The most difficult business decisions to make are the ones that impact our people,” CEO Pekka Lundmark said in the statement. “We have immensely talented employees at Nokia and we will support everyone that is affected by this process.”

The announcement came on the same day that Nokia reported worse-than-expected results. It said sales in the third quarter had fallen 15% compared to the same period a year ago, as “macroeconomic uncertainty and higher interest rates continue to pressure operator spending.”

Mobile network sales fell 19% in the third quarter compared to the previous year, the company added, due to a slowdown in the pace of 5G deployment in markets such as India.

This week, Swedish rival Ericsson also warned that sales in the second half of 2023 would likely come in lower than usual, echoing Nokia’s remarks of a “challenging environment and macroeconomic uncertainty.”

But Nokia has maintained its outlook for 2023, forecasting between €23.2 billion and €24.6 billion ($24.4 billion and $25.9 billion) in sales for the full year.

“We continue to believe in the mid to long term attractiveness of our markets,” Lundmark said.

Remember all of those fantastically horrible handheld LCD games that hit the toy stores back in the ’90s. You know, the ones that had custom LCD screens to make for some fake animation. Here’s an example of what those should have been. It’s an LCD-based handheld with some soul.

The entire thing is roughly the size of a television remote, with a 3D printed case making it very presentable. But looking at the wiring which hides inside proves this is one-of-a-kind. The Arduino Pro Mini is probably the biggest difference in technology from back in the day compared to now. It has plenty of space for all of the different settings and games shown off in the clip below. The user interface itself is definitely a throw-back though. The Nokia 3310 screen boasts a whopping 84×48 pixel monochrome area. There are four buttons serving as a d-pad, and two as action buttons. Perhaps the greatest feature (besides the printed case we already mentioned) is the ability to recharge the internal battery via USB.

[Zippy314] built this with his son. What’s more fun: learning to program the games, or mastering them and discovering the bugs you missed along the way?

Continue studying “Throwback Handheld Built With Modern Hobby Hardware” →

The arrival of LoRa a few years ago gave us at last an accessible licence-free UHF communication protocol with significant range. It’s closed-source, but there are plenty of modules available so it’s found its way into a variety of projects in our community over the years. Among them we’ve seen a few messaging devices, but none quite so slick as [Trevor Attema]’s converted Nokia E63 BlackBerry-like smartphone. The original motherboard with its cellphone radio and Symbian-running processor have been tossed aside, and in its place is a new motherboard that hooks into the Nokia LCD, keypad, backlighting and speaker. To all intents and purposes from the outside it’s a Nokia phone, but one that has been expertly repurposed as a messenger.

On the PCB alongside a LoRa module is an STM32H7 microcontroller and an ATECC608 secure authentication chip for encrypted messages. It’s designed to form a mesh network, further extending the range across which a group can operate.

We like this project for the quality of the work, but we especially like it for the way it uses the Nokia’s components. We’ve asked in the past why people aren’t hacking smartphones, but maybe we’re asking the wrong question. If the smartphone as a unit isn’t useful, then how about its case, components, and form factor? Perhaps a black-brick Android phone will yield little, but the previous generation such as this Nokia use parts that are easy to interface with and well understood. Let’s hope it encourages more experimentation.

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Nokia is slashing its workforce by up to 14,000 employees in an effort to cut costs and better navigate market uncertainty, the company said Thursday.

The company currently staffs 86,000 workers, but will reduce its headcount to between 72,000 and 77,000, it said in a statement.

ROLLS-ROYCE CUTTING UP TO 2,500 JOBS TO Strengthen EFFICIENCY

"Resetting the cost-base is a necessary step to adjust to market uncertainty and to secure our long-term profitability and competitiveness," Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said.

The company also said it expects to act quickly with at least 400 million euros ($422 million) of in-year savings in 2024 and a further 300 million euros ($316 million) in 2025.

MICROSOFT'S LINKEDIN LAYING OFF NEARLY 700 WORKERS

Nokia is also dropping its cost base on a gross basis to between 800 million euros ($846 million) and 1.2 billion euros ($1.26 billion) by the end of 2026, reflecting a 10% to 15% dip in personnel expenses.

"We are streamlining our operating model by embedding sales teams into the business groups," Lundmark said. 

The company is coming off a 20% decrease in third-quarter sales as higher interest rates continue to stunt operator spending.

Despite the dip in quarterly sales, the layoff will ensure Nokia keeps its full-year 2023 outlook on net sales between 23.2 billion euros ($24.5 billion) to 24.6 billion euros ($25.9 billion), with a comparable operating margin between 11.5% to 13%, the technology business said.

Meanwhile, comparable gross margins fell 39.2% year over year, largely due to the regional mix in Mobile Networks, Nokia said. 

Also during the quarter, Nokia’s enterprise net sales jumped 5% year over year on a constant currency basis, while on Wall Street, the company’s stock value slipped roughly 13%.

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Over the last year, shares are down almost 30%.

Nokia has announced plans to cut up to 14,000 jobs over the next three years as it slashes costs after a worse-than-expected slump in demand for its mobile network equipment.

The Finnish technology company said the plans to cut 16% of its 86,000-strong global workforce were part of efforts to cut costs by €1.2bn by the end of 2026. The cuts were announced as the company revealed a 70% drop in third-quarter profits, which fell to €133m (£116m) compared with €428m a year earlier.

The Nokia chief executive, Pekka Lundmark, said: “The most difficult business decisions to make are the ones that impact our people. We have immensely talented employees at Nokia and we will support everyone that is affected by this process.

“Resetting the cost base is a necessary step to adjust to market uncertainty and to secure our long-term profitability and competitiveness. We remain confident about opportunities ahead of us.”

Nokia, which is headquartered in Espoo, Finland, did not detail where the job cuts would fall. It currently employs about 37,700 people in Europe, including in the UK, where it has offices in Bristol, Cambridge and Reading. Job cuts are also likely to affect its operations in the US, where it has about 10,500 staff in offices including in Chicago and Dallas.

Nokia said the exact scale of the cost-cutting programme would depend on demand for its products. However, it “expects to act quickly” in order to save as much as €400m next year and another €300m in 2025.

The company said that demand across the wider mobile networks market was likely to drop 9% overall this year. That is compared with previous expectations for a 2% decline.

That reflected a drop in sales in countries including India, where Nokia said the pace of the country’s 5G rollout had “moderated” and was “no longer enough to offset the slowdown in North America”.

• Nokia said on Thursday it is planning to cut up to 14,000 jobs — or around 16% of its workforce.
• The company is planning to lower costs by up to 1.2 billion euros by 2026.
• In a separate statement, the company said sales declined by 15% in the third quarter.

Finland-based mobile company Nokia is planning to cut between 9,000 to 14,000 jobs amid a sales slump and reduced demand for 5G equipment, it said on Thursday. The higher end of these cuts is likely to impact around 16% of the company's current global workforce of 86,000.

The layoffs are part of cost-cutting measures to reduce expenses by 400 million euros, or $421 million, in 2024 and a further 300 million euros in 2025. 

The company wants to reduce total costs by 1.2 billion euros by 2026.

In a separate statement, Pekka Lundmark, the CEO of Espoo-based Nokia, said that the company's third-quarter sales of 4.9 billion euros had declined by 15% compared to the previous year due to macroeconomic challenges and higher interest rates. 

The company reported operating profits of 424 million euros in the third quarter, a 36% drop from the same period last year.

"Resetting the cost base is a necessary step to adjust to market uncertainty and to secure our long-term profitability and competitiveness," Lundmark said.

Nokia — which sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2014 — expects to meet the lower end of its sales targets in the third quarter, which were set in the range of 23.2 billion to 24.6 billion euros.

Nokia also slashed its outlook for the overall mobile networks market in 2023 and is now expecting a 9% reduction, compared to a previous forecast of a 2% drop. The company's slowing 5G growth in India could no longer compensate for the similar slowdown in North America, said Lundmark.

A Nokia spokesperson directed Insider to the company statement in response to a request for comment.