Finnish cellphone maker Nokia will be eliminating 3,500 jobs, or approximately 6 percent of its workforce, the company announced Thursday. This wave of lay-offs, the second this year for the company, sent the company’s stock up two percent. Nokia executives described the layoffs as a streamlining measure to make the company better able to meet customer demand.
“We are seeing solid progress against our strategy, and with these planned changes we will emerge as a more dynamic, nimble and efficient challenger,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told reporters. “We must take painful, yet necessary, steps to align our work force ad operations with our path forward.”
The company has battled falling stock prices since February, when Elop announced that all new products would make use of the Windows operating system developed by Microsoft. The company lost $502 million in the second quarter as customers declined to purchase smartphones that ran on the discontinued Symbian operating system.
The company is scheduled to introduce its first smartphones on the Windows system in late October.
Read more at The New York Times.
