Succumbing to pressures, Nokia Siemens Networks has decided to chop 1,820 jobs in two European countries – Finland and Germany. This move has come as a part of  the major telecom vendor’s $2.5 billion cost cut measures. 

In an official statement, Nokia Siemens said, 'Continued challenging telecommunications market conditions have shown the need for further reductions'.

The headcount at the Company’s Finland shop will be reduced by 750 employees whereas the shutters will be pulled down at Munich Manufacturing plant that employs 500 workers.

The vendor has decided to sell off a Durach manufacturing site in Germany to the plant's current management.

Apart from these two counties, Egypt and US employees will also be handed over 50 and 20 pink-slips respectively. Nokia‘s cost cut programme will cover 9,000 job-cuts for no unusual reason as the company ruthlessly believes that this measure will help it to improve its profit margin to 10% by 2009.

The operating profit has gone down to 5.1%in the third quarter from 6.7% in the previous one.

Companies like Nokia Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson are the primary players in the telecom vendor segment. But of late, the Chinese players like Huawei and ZTE have pitched into the picture and have been giving a good run for their money. 

Andrew Thomas adds: Nokia Siemens has been rather breathlessly in touch and now maintains that it is merely 'relocating' some of the workers rather than showing them the door. According to a spokesman, 'the ownership of their location is changing.'

In a statement, the company said: "When the plan to form Nokia Siemens Networks was announced on June 19, 2006, Nokia and Siemens said that they expected the merger to result in a headcount adjustment in the range of 10-15 percent of the global workforce. In May of 2007, Nokia Siemens Networks confirmed that it expected the adjustment to remain within that range, at approximately 9,000 employees. To date, the company has achieved an adjustment of more than 6,000 employees and continues to expect a total synergy-related adjustment of approximately 9,000 employees."

'Synergy-related'. Sounds good. Wonder what it means?

"We have now completed the preliminary planning necessary to identify the specific areas where we have additional synergy-related reduction needs," said Bosco Novak, head of human resources at Nokia Siemens Networks. "It is our goal to engage constructively with employee representatives in Finland, Germany and other countries to quickly and fairly achieve these needed changes so we are able to remove the ongoing uncertainty that our employees have about synergy-related headcount reductions."

Now the company is claiming that some of the job losses aren't actually losses at all because workers will be transferred to 'trusted partners'.

In addition to Finland and Germany, the company also announced the planned reduction of approximately 50 employees in Egypt related to the closure of a small manufacturing facility and in the range of 20 employees in the United States related to the ramp down of a small site over the course of 2009.

Or perhaps it will just be relating their trusted partner synergies.

If anyone has a clue what Nokia Siemens is actually doing, could they please drop us a line?

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