More Than 5,000 Microsoft Employees Could Be Laid Off This Week

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 14:19

Satya Nadella took over as Microsoft's CEO just under six months ago and he's already poised to give thousands of employees a pink slip "as soon as this week." Bloomberg reports that the restructuring "may end up being the biggest in Microsoft history," and could surpass the 5,800 employees laid off in 2009.

Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said in an interview last week that he has preparing to make sweeping changes at Microsoft. The reductions will probably be in engineering, marketing and areas of overlap with Nokia, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. [...]

While Microsoft has undergone smaller, intermittent job cuts in individual businesses '-- for example trimming a few hundred positions in advertising sales and marketing in 2012 and some marketing jobs across the company earlier that same year '-- the company has only undertaken a companywide restructuring impacting thousands of workers once before, in 2009 at the start of the recession. Over the course of that year, the company cut 5,800 jobs, or about 5 percent of its workforce at the time.

Many of the cuts are being forced by Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia in 2013. The purchase was supposed to turn Microsoft into a "hardware giant," but Microsoft committed to cutting annual operating costs by $600 million to close the deal.

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