Nokia to erase up to 14,000 employees from payroll Nokia, one of the world's largest telecommunications kit makers, is erasing up to 14,000 jobs after a plunge in net profit was caused by jittery customers delaying spending amid a slowing economy and rising interest rates. Days after Swedish rival Ericsson outlined its challenging trading conditions for calendar Q3 ended …
Because the revenue required to support a workforce of 86,000 requires a global export business. It’s directly *because* the EU banned Huawei RANs, that both Nokia and Ericsson are now in this situation. Sure both of them now have nice guaranteed EU telco contracts…..but the tit for tat, is that they lost their growth markets, which is Asia Pacific, and is 10x the size. Do you want 50% of a static market of 400 million people…..or 30% of a market of 3 billion people, with 10% annual growth rate?
Worth pointing out that Nokia and Ericsson lobbied against the Huawei ban. Neither of their boards are fools. Both of them understood very well the consequences, unlike the EU Commission (and most on this forum). Now, Nokia and Ericsson will have a very comfortable business supplying EU telcos without real competition….but such a business supports maybe 20k employees max, long term. Those survivors will absolutely have jobs for life, and vote the EU Commission as the wonderfullest government ever. But the other 60k employees will lose the jobs over next decade or so, and exit the industry. Become hairdressers on something.
The EU automotive industry is the same: VW CEO is making statements about “the roof is on fire” (Elop’s “standing on a burning platform” anyone?). And the people on here bemoan that “car sales are down….fewer people are travelling in cars nowadays”. Yes in Europe…..but *global* car sales aren’t down. They took a tumble in 2020, but have risen by 10% since then. So why would euro manufacturers be in trouble now? Because VW are excluded from their growth market, by the Commission’s trade war. If you are excluded from a growth market, in a globally static situation, then mathematically you are confined to a contracting market. And soon enough, the Commission will be along to tell us that’s a *good* thing, all part of the plan to reduce CO2 emissions.
Huawei and ZTE always take the lion's share of the Chinese market (Unicom, China Telecom and China Mobile). So, whilst Ericsson and Nokia did lose their Chinese market share three years ago, that was a small fraction of it.
Also note that "Nokia and Ericsson lobbied against the Huawei ban" with questionable sincerity. Probably more with the objective of preserving their maintenance market, and not because they believed that Huawei does not present any security risk. Both Nokia and Ericsson still have significant operations and subsidiaries in China. On the other hand, Nokia, Samsung and Ericsson have largely benefited of that ban in North America and Europe. India was also a welcome growth relay in 2022 and 2023.
It is therefore misleading to explain Nokia and Ericsson's current difficulties as a consequence of that ban (even though it suits the usual narrative of some pro-Chinese members of this forum).
The best proof is that the ban occurred three years ago with little impact on their balance sheets. Whereas today both companies invoke the pause in the North American market as the main cause of their lackluster financial reports.
".but such a business supports maybe 20k employees max, long term"
Indeed. This *was* the rough size of Nokia Networks about 23 years ago. At that time they had just withdrawn from digital switching equipment for telephone exchanges (remember those?), because everything was going towards TCP/IP. So the business then was roughly equivalent to today's business even with all the "add ons".
Nokia total staff back then was about 60,000 and included IT (NBI hadn't been outsourced yet), Phones, ventures organisation, research, corporate/HQ functions, phone manufacturing and the vitally important PowerPoint factory..
Why they need 86,000 today to do what was a 20,000-30,000 employee business during the boom of 2G/3G rollouts...?
It is very personal for everyone affected by the cuts. I wish them every success finding new oocupations.
it costs money to put in all the required back doors, cia, nsa, mi5,mi6 ice, asio, assis, and a heap of others required by 5 eyes, all differant and not to tell any of them about the others, at least 2 agencieys for each country that requires kit thats a capital expence, you watch they will sack to people that are doing this and their market will slip further
Everybody's equipment has access for law enforcement. Why? Because law courts can issue an order or sub poena for access. I haven't read the latest specifications, but it used to be even specified.
"Back in the day" there would be a "legal interception gateway" installed on the network which could be used by legally authorised personnel to legally intercept traffic of the person or persons under investigation.
In short "tl;dr." Nothing to see here.
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