Finland Feels “Betrayed” By Microsoft’s Job Cuts

As you might have heard recently, Microsoft plans to cut as many as 18,000 jobs by next year. This is no doubt a pretty huge cut and there would be many people who will be out of a job. Most of the job cuts will be of former Nokia employees who were absorbed post-acquisition, which includes about 1,100 people in Finland.

Well as it turns out, Finland, the home country of Nokia, isn’t too thrilled about the job cuts. In fact the country’s newly-appointed finance minister, Antti Rinne, was quoted as saying that it felt like a betrayal. Speaking to Finnish business daily Kauppalehti, Rinne said, “It can be said that we have been betrayed. At the time of the Nokia deal Microsoft announced it is committed to Finnish expertise. Now it seems this commitment isn’t fully met.”

The job cuts follows Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella’s direction of the company, which is to make it leaner and more efficient. Along with the job cuts, Microsoft had also announced that they would be doing away with a lot of Nokia’s previous mobile efforts, including the Nokia X lineup of Android phones which they will convert into Windows Phone handsets.

They also announced that Nokia’s feature phones would be getting the axe as well. This means that the only Nokia phones we can expect from Microsoft could be its Lumia Windows Phone lineup, which we guess is not a bad thing since it would allow them to focus all of their efforts onto it.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: Microsoft, Nokia