back to article Ericsson pulls plug on 8,500 workers

Ericsson is planning to cut 8,500 workers, or about eight percent of its 105,000-strong workforce. The layoffs are said to be coming worldwide mostly in the first half of this year, and some possibly into the next. "The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice," CEO Borje Ekholm …

  1. ChoHag Silver badge

    > Our biggest enemy right now may be complacency.

    Your biggest enemy right now is that having sucked the souls out of your customers you and the other darlings of this century have turned to fucking their own staff.

    1. Plest Silver badge
      Unhappy

      The only one who cares about you, is you!

      If you ever thought there was such a thing as loyalty, you never more wrong. It may have been slightly different 25+ years ago but now no one is irreplaceable, we all just cogs in the machine and we're all expendable. Yeah, it's a dreadful realisation that we're heading back to the days of the "dark satanic mills" but there we have it, make your pile and get out as soon as you have enough 'cos the only one who cares about you I'm afraid, is you!

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

        " we all just cogs in the machine and we're all expendable."

        As seen by accountants. Somebody who has run a small business knows how costly it is to hire and train new staff so suffering a lower profit in the short term might be a wise move looking further ahead. Funny we don't see "manglement" looking for ways to increase business while letting natural attrition cut back on the staff a bit. Any smart worker that sees things slowing down at the company they are currently with should be looking for a new position elsewhere before the axe falls.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

          ...and jump ship to somewhere you have no idea whether it's slowing down or not. Moving you from possibly fired in the short term, to definitely fired because you were one of the last in. Genius.

        2. Xalran

          Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

          Ericsson used to be an Engineer company, but between the Internet Bubble, the introductions of the shares in the NY stock Exchange which required following SOX all the way and the various scandals in the Middle/Far East, it's now a company driven and mangled by accountants.

          Everything at all the levels is based on accounting values, and if you don't fit in the new Ericsson mould, your the weakest link, and you will be shown the door, none way or another.

      2. Justthefacts Silver badge

        Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

        This isn’t actually management’s fault (sorta), there’s something much more fundamental going on in Ericsson’s case. Its core business is Radio Access Nodes (RAN). It’s a strong second in the market in a governmentally defined global triopoly at this point (Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia), and yet it’s basically not profitable. It’s EBIT (already a massaged measure) is 15%, which is a massive improvement over just a couple years ago - that’s just not good enough for a tech company, which needs 30%+ to invest in tech. But they have to employ 100,000 staff to code up the new features of 4G, 5G, 6G etc. 5G is a business disaster: it’s smart technological ideas, a perfectly sensible rollout, but it’s basically a re-tread of exactly the same sales as 4G, no new customers. From the point-of-view of its customers (the operators) the key feature of 5G is lower capex and lower opex, which the standard achieves by defining virtualised RAN on *commodity* hardware. So, Ericsson are stuck employing 100,000 smart people on a standards treadmill, to access a market segment in negative growth.

        The sort of feature Ericsson has got trapped into, which is exciting but continuing its value destruction: one major feature of 5G Advanced is NTN, which is 5G over LEO satellites. Amazing, what a time to be alive, huh? Well, I’ve got experience in exactly this area, I can tell you it’s going to cost them $3bn+ to develop, but the actual market size for [regenerative RAN on satellite] is at most 5000 LEO satelllites, price ceiling $300k per payload unit, total $1.5bn. Or onboard GEO, the price ceiling is about $40M commercial, $80M governmental but there’s only three of those per project. It’s not that we haven’t thought of doing it, it’s that it doesn’t make commercial sense. However. Ericsson will get a couple of billion “investment” from the EU Commission to break even. Then the EU will launch its own constellation of a dozen units, totally non-competitive with Starlink, and say “look at us Mum, ta da we’re doing Spaaaace!”. And Ericsson simply can’t decide not participate in this nonsense, because then they get pilloried by the EU losing other subsidies.

        1. Xalran

          Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

          It's Svanberg and Borjë fault if Ericsson is where it is right now.

          The first one tried to diversify in Media &IP ( Technicolor, Redbee, Redback... ) and create an Ericsson Global Service ( obviously a consluting outfit similar to IBM Global Services ) beside Ericsson the Hardware Provider, it failed miserably in all the countries where it was implemented ( cue : it was called Ericsson ITSS ) and depending on the country it was either folded back into Ericsson or cut/sold when the branch was too rotten. In the meantime Ericsson moved from company that was only in the Stockholm stock exchange to one that was traded internationally ( and especially in NY with all the US Federal loopholes that needs to be jumped through ) because it was thought to be a bright idea. It's also the time where they culled all the side branches Svanberg didn't like : The military branch ( avionics, radars, ... ) and Space ( satellites ) was sold to Saab Aerospace. The mobile phone, after a joint-venture time was sold to Sony. The PBX branch was sold to Aastrium and so on.

          Overall it failed. Most of the Media bit has been resold or spun out, Redback got absorbed and it's product basically thrown away ( like it was done years earlier with Torrent and ACC in the same domain ).

          Ericsson covers the whole network ( and not just the RAN ) with a wide selection of products, sometime in competition with each other... But the main issue is the fact that Telecom evolved from a universe where everything was proprietary hardware and software to one where it's COTS Dell/HPE servers for almost everything in the core network. It's now also happening in the RAN ( OpenRAN ) and it hurts Ericsson badly as the RAN was the revenue cow they had been milking for decades.

          Now they are trying another external growth with Vonage and the German cell company they bought two years ago.... Is it going to work ? Good question.

          Side note : between 2001 and 2005 Ericsson went from 135000 employees to 32000. And despite the fact that they kept slashing headcount here and there all the way through the last two decades they managed to grow back to 100K+ But most of the technical jobs went to China and India, Europe and America has mostly sales droids, project manglers, service manglers, coordinators, and most importantly beancounters. There's a few technical persons left, but they are here as both puppet to show operators that there's some local technical knowledge and as firemen to fix all the things the Indians and Chinese broke or didn't implement correctly.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

        It may have been slightly different 25+ years ago

        No, it wasn't. Those were the imaginary "good old days", just as people 25 years from now will look back longingly at the golden days of the 2020s. Nothing really changes.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

          Welcome to planet earth. Get over yourself.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The only one who cares about you, is you!

        I'm almost certain that particular attitude and those of a certain age it inhabits had absolutely nothing to do with the breakdown of...oh...whatcha callits...you know, when people have to be around other people and function as more than just selfish narcissists...there's a word for that right?

    2. Terry Barnes

      The telecoms equipment business is, and always has been, cyclical. Manufacturers ramp up staff as something new rolls out and then they ramp back down. It’s always been that way and people who work in the industry understand it. Businesses that are slow to ramp down tend to go bust and then everyone loses their job.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Don't forget wasteful at the R&D level...very important.

        I worked on a 5G project (related to content delivery) for a large UK network, it was a great project and had a lot of potential...there were 60 engineers involved in massive email torrents every day, but only 3 of us actually hands on doing anything. Project was canned for being "too labour intensive, due to the number of people involved". Thanks 57 jobs worths, you killed a fucking project through "death by email".

  2. Paul Herber Silver badge
    Coat

    'At least we know who isn't going to suffer Stockholm syndrome'

    Does Ericsson gear suffer from Malmöware?

    Var är min kappa?

    1. Happy_Jack

      You go and get your coat.

    2. ecofeco Silver badge
  3. Trotts36

    Elon leads the way

    The results of twitter blood bath are in : and the corporate overlords like the results.. so they are following.

    There are many good developers; but there are also a lot of sub standard; straight of college wasters; I’m afraid the next few years are going to be bad for the weaker ones.

    Good luck

    1. EarthDog

      Re: Elon leads the way

      How good you are does not make a difference. I saw people with years of experince, solid code, and their names on several patents get thrown away.

  4. Lars
    Coat

    Stockholm syndrom

    It has absolutely nothing to do with that except their headquarters are in Stockholm.

    And it's not anything new either.

    "Ericsson launched several rounds of restructuring, refinancing and job-cutting; during 2001, staff numbers fell from 107,000 to 85,000.[23] A further 20,000 went the next year,[24] and 11,000 more in 2003.".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson

    And about the syndrome:

    "Stockholm syndrome is a proposed condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors.".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Stockholm syndrom

      Thanks for that definition. I’d have never known!!

    2. Xalran

      Re: Stockholm syndrom

      Note that during the purge you mention, Ericsson also moved it's headquarter from the historical Telefonplan to Kista.

      ( obviously both are in Stockhölm area, the first one in the south, the second one in the north. )

  5. C Berlin

    Day laborers

    Pretty amazing, any time there are layoffs the world is accusing the company on greed and all that good stuff.

    Now I read about the lack of loyalty! how laughable is that :-)

    "We" are white color workers, the day laborers of the post industrial age.

    American employment contracts are "at will" you can get fired for no reason at any time.

    (take note my dear friends in most northern European countries).

    And keep in mind when you see the classical day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot (home improvement store chain in the US).

    I don't think any tech worker has an ambition to change with their lot.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like