The cuts, which will mainly fall in Finland, mark the end of the US company’s attempt to take on Apple and Samsung

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Microsoft is cutting up to 1,850 jobs in its smartphone business just two years after it bought handset maker Nokia in an ill-fated attempt to take on market leaders Apple and Samsung.



In a move that clearly puts the stamp of two-year chief executive Satya Nadella on the US company, Microsoft said on Wednesday it would shed the bulk of the jobs in Finland and write down $950m from the business. It did not say how many employees currently work on smartphones in the group as a whole.

Shares of Microsoft were trading at around $52 late on Wednesday on Wall Street, roughly flat with their $51.59 close Tuesday, but significantly up from $34.20 when Nadella became CEO in February 2014.

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Remaking Microsoft, known primarily for its software, into a more device-focused company was a hallmark of previous chief executive Steve Ballmer.

In one of his last major acts, Ballmer closed a deal to buy Nokia’s struggling but once-dominant handset business for about $7.2bn in late 2013. The deal closed in April 2014, two months after Nadella became boss.

Since then, Nadella has shaved away at the phone business, starting with a 2015 restructuring that put the devices group, previously a stand-alone unit under the former Nokia chief, Stephen Elop, under the Windows group. Run by Terry Myerson, the Windows division is the company’s biggest.

A Finnish union representative told Reuters the cuts would essentially put an end to Microsoft’s development of new phones.

“My understanding is that Windows 10 will go on as an operating system, but there will be no more phones made by Microsoft,” said Kalle Kiili, a shop steward.

Microsoft said in a statement it would continue to develop the Windows 10 platform and support its Lumia smartphones, but gave no comment on whether it would develop new Windows phones.

Global market share of Windows smartphones fell below 1% in the first quarter of 2016, according to research firm Gartner.

Last year, Microsoft announced $7.5bn of writedowns and 7,800 job cuts in its phone business.

Earlier this month, Microsoft sold its entry-level feature phones business for $350m.

The company said on Wednesday it expected to cut all 1,350 jobs at its Finnish mobile phone unit and close down a research and development site in the country. A further 500 jobs will go in other countries, it said, without giving details.

“We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation,” Nadella said in a statement. “We will continue to innovate across devices and on our cloud services across all mobile platforms.“

Nokia had around 40% of the world’s mobile phone market in 2008 before it was eclipsed by the rise of touch-screen smartphones.

As a result, Nokia and Microsoft have slashed thousands of Finnish jobs over the past decade, and the lack of substitute jobs is the main reason for the country’s current economic stagnation.

Nokia, now focused on telecom network equipment, just last week said it was cutting around 1,000 jobs in Finland following its acquisition of Franco-American rival Alcatel-Lucent .

The Microsoft phone business still has a dedicated fan in Ballmer, who bragged about his device at a San Francisco dinner hosted by Fortune in March.

“It’s a Windows phone,” he said as the audience laughed. “Why wouldn’t it be?”



