Microsoft and Nokia's
India operations are among the biggest outside their home countries,
and it looks like a certain number of redundancies and consequent
layoffs are inevitable. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's email to Microsoft
employees on the Nokia deal said the companies would integrate all
global marketing and have a unified brand and advertising strategy. It
said that finance, legal, HR, communications, evangelism, customer care
and business development would integrate functionally at Microsoft.
ICM/IT will also integrate functionally for traditional IT roles, it
said.
Such integration in most cases implies redundancies. Nokia
has 9,000 employees in India, almost a tenth of its global workforce.
Microsoft has 6,000 employees here, out of its global strength of
97,000. It's unlikely that there will be much overlap at the
engineering, support and R&D levels, because Nokia is a devices
company, and Microsoft largely a software company.
But in all of
the divisions that Ballmer's mail mentions as being integrated, layoffs
are likely. Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst in Gartner, said
there could be redundancies.
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