Friday, July 18, 2014

Microsoft axes 18,000 jobs, mostly concentrated in hardware division


Many ex-Nokia employees laid off as Microsoft seeks to restructure.




Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Thursday that Microsoft will be laying off 18,000 employees over the course of 2014 with 12,500 jobs being cut from the hardware division mostly made up staff brought over from Nokia.

These layoffs will amount to approximately 14 percent of the 127,000 currently employed by the company.

“The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce,” Nadella said in a press release. “My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible. We will offer severance to all employees impacted by these changes, as well as job transition help in many locations, and everyone can expect to be treated with the respect they deserve for their contributions to this company.”

According to reports, former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told Nokia staff that the bulk of these cuts will be in the San Diego, Beijing, Dongguan, China and Oulu, Finland offices. Reportedly Microsoft’s Xbox Entertainment Studios, which produces episodic video content for the Xbox Live network, will also close. A report from Geekwire also said that the company’s operating system’s division will be “slightly harder hit by the first wave of cuts.”

It’s not known where the rest of the cuts will come from, though earlier reports have said they will be from Microsoft’s marketing and quality assurance divisions.

Microsoft’s last round of layoffs was in 2009 due to the recession.





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