Nokia on Wednesday said that it would hand off all future development and support for its Symbian mobile operating system to Accenture and cut 7,000 related jobs as part of its plan to adopt Microsoft’s Windows Phone as the primary OS for its smartphone products.
The company would be transferring roughly over 3000 employees to Accenture by the end of this year. This transfer will majorly affect countries including India, US, UK, Finland and China. Nokia has further mentioned that Accenture will provide all Symbian based software development and support services to the Finnish manufacturer, giving Nokia the power to mainly focus on Microsoft’s Windows Phone. The company has also decided to layoff a total of 4000 employees globally by the end of 2012. It will mostly affect employees from UK, Denmark and Finland.
Nokia India will lay off about 300 of its 1,500 engineers working at the Research and Development center in India. Out of the remaining engineers a total of 700 would be transferred to Accenture as an effort to cut the annual phone unit research R&D costs.
Nokia will have all the affected employees under its payroll until the end of this year, and the layoffs will take place in phases. Furthermore the company has announced they will rethink their strategy on its Research and Development facilities around the world, and they may end up closing down some units.
Source: Information Week