As expected, Microsoft on Thursday announced a huge round of layoffs that will see roughly 18,000 employees lose their jobs. Of these layoffs, 12,500 will come from Microsoft’s Nokia devices division, representing yet another major blow to the one-time mobile phone giant. In his announcement of the layoffs, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that they were necessary as part of “starting to evolve our organization and culture.”
“The first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce,” Nadella explained. “My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible. We will offer severance to all employees impacted by these changes, as well as job transition help in many locations, and everyone can expect to be treated with the respect they deserve for their contributions to this company.”
When explaining why so many Nokia employees got axed, Nadella said that they were needed to “realize the synergies to which we committed when we announced the acquisition last September.” Nadella also said that Microsoft would be taking some of the designs for Nokia’s Android-based X line of smartphones and retooling them to run Windows Phone instead to build on the momentum Nokia had achieved in the budget phone market.
