But on Wednesday, Microsoft’s current chief executive, Satya Nadella, sought to leave that deal in the past. “In the near term, we’ll run a more effective and focused phone portfolio business while retaining capability for long-term reinvention in mobility”.
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Two years after its $7.2 billion (£4.6 billion) purchase of Nokia’s phone business, Microsoft is cutting 7,800 jobs in an ongoing reshuffle. It had 118,600 employees at the end of March, with about 60,000 of them in the US.
Nokia pioneered the GSM mobile phone standard and used to dominate the mobile device market in Europe and much of the world until 2007, when Apple introduced the first iPhone. The platform has failed to compete against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, never taking more than a single figure share of global smartphone usage. The mobile sector will bear the brunt of the layoffs that comes a year after 18,000 jobs were cut due to a restructuring.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Microsoft Inc’s future in mobile devices likely hinges on the software maker’s ability to convince developers to create apps for the phone version of Windows 10 after its ill-fated Nokia acquisition helped trigger 7,800 layoffs. The company has begun to streamline its efforts and focus on its core strengths, which includes the Microsoft Office software as well as cloud computing. The company said it will also write down almost $7.6B related to the company’s Nokia business.
While Microsoft will not halt the production of smartphones, Nadella said Wednesday that the tech giant would no longer focus on the growth of that business, and instead emphasize the expansion of a broad “ecosystem” of products.
Microsoft also confirmed that it is selling a part of its mapping unit to Uber, the multimillion dollar cab company, while Uber is expected to offer jobs to 100 Microsoft employees.
“I am committed to our first-party devices including phones,” he wrote.
The Nokia deal was made under Nadella’s predecessor Steve Ballmer, who wanted Microsoft to make its own smartphones and tablets.
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As BGR notes, a number of analysts told The New York Times that they predicted there would be a write-down of the value of the Nokia handset division.
