Saturday, September 7, 2013

Microsoft‘s Nokia deal, Layoffs look inevitable



 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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